The Usonian Church

I often say that ecclesiology is what keeps me up at night.

I’ve spent the majority of my life in churches that assumed we can and should shape the church to suit our tastes and conveniences: We create the kind of youth ministry that keeps our teens docile, we build facilities that cater to every self-serving multi-purpose imaginable, and we change the time and place of gatherings to accommodate our devotion to other cultural phenomena (like football and Friends). If the congregation is largely white and middle-class then the church ends up looking like a discreet warehouse in the suburbs because that reflects the ideals of middle-class American industrial success. Similarly, the worship looks like a Fleetwood Mac or Coldplay concert (depending on the church’s age) because that reflects white, middle-class ideals for a tastefully edgy kind of musical experience.

To a certain extent this is good because the church must be contextualized into a given culture. That is, after all, the task of the missionary (1 Cor 9:20). But at some point this becomes a problem. If your church looks like a Wal Mart, walks like a Wal Mart, and quacks like a Wal Mart…isn’t it really just a Wal Mart? Is it still a church? Is it a place where God is re-making you into His image, or have you merely re-made Him in your own image of cozy American consumer success (can I supersize that for you)? This is how we shape the church to suit our needs and tastes.

But what if church shaped us?

Frank Lloyd Wright was, of course, one of the great modern American architects of the 20th century. I’ve always been fascinated with his work, but over the last few years I’ve come to view his approach to architecture through the lens of a missionary-to-the-west, because in many ways the task of an architect and the task of a churchman are the same; we both create dwellings for the human soul. I’ve stumbled across at least three aspects of Wrights architectural philosophy that have stimulated my thinking about church-making:

Democratized Existence

In the 1930′s Wright came into a new-found success and began to embark on one of the most prolific periods of his life. It was during this phase that he introduced the idea of the Usonian home.

“[Wright] set out in 1936 to build a number of $5,000 Usonian houses. These houses were an attempt to produce a well-designed, low-cost dwelling that average Americans could buy. (Of course, like most of his projects, they went over budget and cost about $10,000 each.) Only 60 Usonian houses were ever built.”

Deeply embedded within this grand vision was a belief that high quality, aesthetic homes should be available to every American and that American life could be re-engineered around more organic, egalitarian principles.

“They [Usonian homes] provided high quality environments for teachers, writers, small store owners – average income earners, who before, could not dream of owning an architectural masterpiece.

One aspects of Wright’s Usonian vision was Broadacre City, a master planned template for American suburban life that involved giving every American a one-acre plot of land from the Federal Land Reserves. In the Broadacre concept (eventually used to built 47 homes on 100 acres in Usonia, New York) utilized a common-ownership model where each circular lot overlapped with the neighbor’s own circular property, giving everyone a communal interest through shared ownership. For Wright, this was more than an architectural gimmick. He was driven by an idealistic vision, saying, “Until we have an organic culture we will never have organic architecture.”

Objective Aesthetic

However, Wright’s commitment to democratic ideals only extended as far as he thought the people agreed with his tastes.

“Wright has an ambivalent relationship to democracy and to the mass. He has two words: democracy, which he thinks is a good word; and mobocracy, which he thinks is a bad word…He wanted to be a democratic architect who would educate the American people to an aesthetic greater than the one that they had already achieved. He loathed architecture of the mob which pulled architecture down to the least common denominator…over and over and over again, he does continue to build buildings for relatively poor clients, many more than most architects of his stature would have been doing at that time. It’s not to say that they’re not expensive buildings, not to say that they would ever have been a mass form, but he is committed to that democratic vision.” —William Cronon, Historian

To put it bluntly, Wright believed in a kind of aesthetic Truth. He knew that beauty could inspire and transform people, but more than that, he believed his was the right vision of architectural aesthetics. Not just any “beauty” would do, and it certainly wasn’t in the eye of the beholder. He had an idealistic concept of what was good and bad design and expected people – including his clients – to conform to his vision of what was right.

Incarnational Construction

Still, while Wright’s design is almost universally lauded, his commitment to “organic” designs is perhaps what he is best known for. But for Wright, organic didn’t mean a more natural organizational dynamic like some church-thinkers today. Rather, organic meant an earthier kind of structure and lifestyle, a naturalistic holism, even what me might call “green” today. Accordingly, his architecture utilize the raw materials of the surrounding area, often incorporating them in unique and innovative ways throughout the decorative and even systemic features of the home. He came to believe that a building should seem to be a natural outgrowth of the immediate landscape – and, by extension, that the people should too. This philosophy became apparent with the construction of Wright’s second residence, Taliesin:

“New to this project [Taliesin] was the use of native limestone in rough masonry walls making it seem as if the house had grown from the very hill on which it sat, an organic work of architecture.”

This approach was achieved by Wright most dramatically in the famous “Falling Water” house in Pennsylvania:

“Fallingwater’s floors and roofs are dramatically cantilevered over the waterfall of Bear Run, a creek in western Pennsylvania. Executed in reinforced concrete, the house’s floating planes echo the stream’s cascading flow…
Wright’s design makes the interior space of the house continuous with the outdoors, fusing the house with its site.”

Wright’s careful commitment to contextualization didn’t end with the environment. He also carefully considered the people who would inhabit the structures he built, listening attentively to their needs and tailoring each home accordingly.

“To give the small Jacobs family the benefit of the advantages of the era in which they live, many simplifications must take place. Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs must themselves see life in somewhat simplified terms. What are essentials in their case, a typical case? It is not only necessary to get rid of all unnecessary complications in construction, necessary to use work in the mill to good advantage, necessary to eliminate so far as possible, field labor which is always expensive: it is necessary to consolidate and simplify the three appurtenance systems—heating, lighting, and sanitation. At least this must be our economy if we are to achieve the sense of spaciousness and vista we desire in order to liberate the people living in the house.”

One might even call this an incarnational approach to architecture, wherein the home and the people join with the local landscape in order to find reconciliation and harmony. Something interesting arises in this quote. We’ve become privy to the paradoxical outcome of Wright’s ambition for democratization and idealism: namely, that the people themselves should not only be sheltered and liberated by the home, but that they should also be conformed to the structure of the house, which leads us to our next observation.

Formational Living

Wright’s approach to architecture was also viewed as somewhat tyrannical in that he believed the people should be sublimated to the house in which they lived. This was an insane idea during the height of modernity, where science, engineering, and technology are seen to exist primarily for the purpose of bending the world to our needs and desires. This had a tendency to infuriate clients and colleagues, many of whom apparently put up with his eccentricities only because of his stature of success. Yet interestingly, Wright understood perhaps better than anyone that the form molds who you become, a reality that can be rather uncomfortable at first, but ultimately, given the right understanding of true human needs, becomes more than merely comfortable, it becomes liberating and joyful. Consider this account of the Usonian “Pew” house and it’s owners struggle to learn to live in it:

“She [Mrs Pew] described how, at first she hated the house. She felt that Mr. Wright had not listened to her requirements but merely built what he wanted. She was, at the end of her second year living in it, ready to sell it and move on – at great financial sacrifice. She told me that she decided that she would “give the house a year without struggling with it” before she made up her mind. In that year, a transformation took place. She discovered that “Mr. Wright had not built a house for who I was” – but for “the person that I could become. It turned out that Mr. Wright had listened well and understood me very deeply [...] Now, I can hardly stand to be in other people’s homes.”

We all say we want transformation into Christlikeness, but we generally don’t want the inconvenience and discomfort transformation requires. The reality is that all forms and structures shape us for better or for worse. Wherever you spend most of your time will determine what you become. That is true of our bodies and our spirits. What kind of people are we bound to become if our churches are crafted completely to suit our every whim and desire?

What if we could build churches that pushed authority for ministry to the people at the edges, gathered its “materials” from the local culture, and then used those materials to create forms and structures that not only inspired us and met our needs, but intentionally shaped and molded us into the people we’re meant to become? What would such an “organic” structure look like? How would it be different than current forms?

Other Sources:

http://www.pbs.org/flw/buildings/index.html

http://www.buffalo.edu/news/5636

http://www.matttaylor.com/public/PostUsonian.htm

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