Landslides force dismantling of Frank Lloyd Wright Jr’s celebrated glass chapel: ‘It’s a crying shame’
By Audrey Gray
The Guardian
May 31, 2024
For 73 years it reigned, unique and serene, on a high plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean: the Wayfarers Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr’s midcentury reinvention of what a church could be.
The photogenic, see-through sanctuary framed in a canopy of redwoods was beloved long before it became Instagram-famous. Jayne Mansfield was married there, Brian Wilson too. Last Christmas Eve, two weeks after the chapel had been designated a National Historic Landmark, it took three services to accommodate everyone who showed up to spend the holiday with chapel regulars. No one knew it would be the last one.