Former Church Designed By Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, was an architect in his own right, although not much of his work is found outside of California. Born and raised in suburban Oak Park, Lloyd decided to study and train elsewhere even with all that Chicago had to offer at the time in terms of an architectural career. He eventually made his way to San Diego to assist with the 1915 Panama-California Exposition and would stay in the state for the rest of his life, launching an independent career in 1920.
It’s hard to escape Frank Lloyd Wright’s name in Chicagoland, especially for someone like me who has worked in a number of his buildings. So coming across this former church in suburban Park Ridge ten years ago definitely caught my attention. At first I thought it might have been designed by one of his Taliesin apprentices. After some research, I was surprised to find out it wasn’t designed by a student of Wright, but his own son!
Originally a farm owned by William and Bertha Pump, their land in north Park Ridge was sold for a new sixty-home development in 1957.1 A two-acre piece of the unincorporated Ballard Gardens subdivision was set aside by developer Godfrey Lindstrom for a local parish, Good Shepherd Community Church, looking for a permanent location.2 Lloyd, working with his son Eric Lloyd Wright, was hired by the church with construction taking place between December 1958 and May 1961.
Some of Lloyd Wright’s architectural trademarks can be found in this building, specifically its soaring forms and a flair for theatricality, something Lloyd picked up while working as a set designer for Paramount Studios in Hollywood.3 The church’s steep roofline is similar to Wright’s later designs, like the “Bird of Paradise” house, in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
Like his father, Lloyd attempted to make a connection between the building and the natural world with a berm created on the site. The church featured a "living wall" that was actually set into the berm so the building appeared to be bursting forth from the ground. The interior skylights and roofline then made a further connection between earth and the spiritual world. In the '90s the berm was later moved back away from the wall, to improve access to the building.
The declining membership of the church forced them to sell the 20,000 square foot building to Maine Township in 1983. Although the oldest local government in the Chicagoland area, it had been using a rented storefront in Des Plaines before moving here. Yet Maine Township could not occupy the former church until making $400,000 worth of improvements, including moving the main entrance to what was once the rear of the building and installing elevators.4 It has respectfully preserved the building’s integrity, even working with Arthur Dennis Stevens (who in 1948 became Wright’s youngest apprentice at Taliesin) to construct a 7,000-square-foot addition along with a double garage in 1995-96. Stevens did a good job in creating a cohesive look; he even included original details in the new structure such as incorporating triangular copper trim. A visitor would never guess it was built nearly forty years after the church.
For a time Stevens was the one-time architectural partner of Don Erickson, another Wright apprentice who started his own private practice in 1951. He designed a number of modernist buildings across Chicagoland, including homes in Park Ridge like the Jerry Seidel House, built in 1968, and a 1962 home on Park Lake with its own private beach. But Erickson is probably best known for the now closed Indian Lakes Resort in suburban Bloomingdale as well as the “Bird Cage” apartments in Chicago’s Rogers Park.
Today developers constantly make excuses at the high costs of preserving older buildings, and the majority end up demolished, ruining a city’s heritage and character. But Good Shepherd Community Church is a great example of adaptive reuse. Although now slightly altered and enlarged, this former church and its main sanctuary space remains intact. The building honors its history and famous architect while also continuing to serve its local area, just in a new and different way.
https://mainetown.com/our-community/history/
http://revitalizedesplaines.blogspot.com/2010/10/wright-in-maine-maine-township-town.html
https://www.laconservancy.org/architects/lloyd-wright
https://www.americantowns.com/place/maine-township-park-ridge-il.html