San Diego Cityscape: Built to awe: San Diego churches reflect a century of efforts to inspire worshippers
From Irving Gill and Carleton Winslow and from Renzo Zecchetto and David Pfeifer, region’s architects have embraced designing distinctive houses of worship
From somewhere atop a curved stairway, organ music billows in waves.
Ascend toward the sound and as the music swells you’ll enter a light-filled sanctuary half the size of a football field. Here is a cloistered Shangri-La with seating for 1,000, between banks of colored glass and with a red carpet that leads toward a modest altar and a vista of gray-green landscape. On a weekday afternoon, you might even spot organist Jaebon Hwang, a diminutive figure seated at a console, sending sacred music through 6,092 pipes.
What can you do except sit down and ponder the space, light and sound?
Here at the First United Methodist Church in Mission Valley is the epitome of sacred architecture. Designed by Reginald Inwood, completed in 1964, the church demonstrates how a building can be both a highly visible landmark and a place for inexplicable thoughts and feelings. It is a massive structure made from tons of concrete and steel but from a distance looks as delicate as a single sheet of white paper folded into an arch with slanted sides.
Just across Mission Valley, Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá, built in the early 1800s with a Mission-style adobe facade, bell tower, wall niches and gold decoration, is the polar opposite of First United, but produces a similarly powerful effect. On Sundays, sermons echo through the space beneath a timbered ceiling, and when the gigantic bells toll, good luck not feeling something special.
San Diego provides a veritable history of church design, from grand Catholic cathedrals such as Our Lady of the Rosary in Little Italy (1925) that reflect centuries of decorative and architectural tradition, to architect Irving Gill’s early 20th-century stark white chapels of arches and cubes. Then there are one-off 1960s designs such as First United, the triangulated Trinity Presbyterian in Spring Valley, and the flower-like Canyon Ridge Baptist in Linda Vista, along with wild cards such as East San Diego’s Sovannkiry Buddhist Temple, with its wild curlicues and fantastic creatures from another realm.
When you see what is possible, you can’t blame architects for seeking sacred commissions as essential experiences in their careers. Many prominent architects have done them in San Diego. The list includes Gill and his nephew Louis J. Gill, Carleton Winslow, Bertram Goodhue (primary architect for Balboa Park), Frank L. Hope and Rob Wellington Quigley.
The evolution of church architecture
Especially to non-churchgoers and atheists, religions may seem like relics of the past, but most have kept up with trends in architecture and fashion. Catholic and Presbyterian congregations, which represent more than half of San Diegans who identify with a religion, are old and formidable institutions, yet a vital part of their mission is to stay relevant and attract new generations.
Architect David Pfeifer is a partner at Domus Studio in San Diego, which is named for its forefather Lou Dominy. The firm has more than 300 credits for sacred buildings including Mater Dei Catholic Church in Otay Mesa, San Dieguito United Methodist Church, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Dieguito, Solana Beach Presbyterian and Sacred Heart in Coronado, which is an expansion of a 1920 Irving Gill design.
Pfeifer, a Catholic who has worshipped in all sorts of sanctuaries, said that regardless of style or materials, the objective of church design is the same: To orchestrate a transition from secular to sacred, a sense of removal from life’s day-to-day bustle to spaces for quiet consideration. This begins in parking lots with rows of cars softened by trees and other greenery, and sidewalks that lead to gravel paths that enter garden spaces and courtyards tucked between buildings.
“When you get out of your car and enter a cloister of buildings, you shouldn’t have to interact with a vehicle again,” Pfeifer said.
It seems that the design of sanctuaries always comes back to light and sky. No matter what style, a well-designed church lifts your attention toward nature — rows of deep-set windows at the Mission, arched windows and a domed skylight at Gill’s First Church of Christ Scientist near downtown San Diego, slices of daylight through asymmetrical openings at Mater Dei or at architect Renzo Zecchetto’s St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Oceanside.
Zecchetto, whose San Diego projects date back three decades to his work with architect Charles Moore on the Church of the Nativity in Fairbanks Ranch, said that the essence of his designs is “manipulating space and light. The interesting light at St. Thomas More comes from the west, but the west also has a busy road.”
To shield worshippers from traffic noise, the west-facing wall is mostly solid, with the entrance tucked on the south side. But that magic daylight still penetrates the sanctuary thanks to vertical, horizontal and diagonal strips of glass that produce prismatic effects.
Form and functionality
Dating to Medieval times, churches were often laid out in symmetrical and symbolic cruciform plans defined by the placement of aisles, pews and sacred areas for priests and choirs. Today, some congregations still prefer that tradition, but buildings such as Mater Dei and St. Thomas More use diagonals and asymmetry in their floorplans and forms not only for visual and emotional impact, but for practical purposes: to bring people closer to one another, the pulpit and the altar, in ways that traditional churches sometimes don’t.
San Diego’s modernist churches have also been innovative in engineering and materials—particularly concrete. Inwood’s First United structure is supported by four soaring arches that were cast on the ground and tilted into place by cranes. Gill, San Diego’s most famous modern architect, pioneered tilt-up concrete with buildings such as his La Jolla Woman’s Club, and concrete also figures prominently in church designs such as St. Thomas More.
“When I started out here, concrete was resisted but has gotten more and more use in the U.S.,” said Zecchetto, who was born in Santiago, Chile, and as a child attended services at an early-1960s Benedictine monastery chapel there — a sleek white concrete building co-designed by that parish’s Father Guarda.
Along with building materials and architecture, sacred art also plays an integral role in a church’s drama, whether at Our Lady of the Rosary, Mater Dei or St. Thomas More. Our Lady’s recently restored bas reliefs and deep-hued paintings were commissioned from Venetian painter Fausto Tasca, who in the 1920s resided in Southern California. Domus works with clients to identify a theme for each sacred building, and the theme guides the art. At Mater Dei — “Mother of God” — the theme was Mother Mary.
“The architecture has feminine attributes,” Pfeifer said. “Curved seating and ceiling lines — the ceiling lines are like the arms of an embrace from Mary.” Mater Dei’s small chapel, tucked behind the cross, is a curved enveloping space meant to evoke a mother’s womb.
Pfeifer said that Domus hired Artisans Don Bosco — missionaries who make sacred art in stone, wood and glass at workshops in Peru — to provide elements at Mater Dei such as its spectacular depiction of Christ on the cross. “What’s unique is that they have artists who are incredibly talented but who are also deeply religious.”
At First United, you might consider the organ a work of art unto itself. Visual design was clearly a consideration with this sprawling instrument. At the front of the sanctuary, towering pipes flank the chancel, and at the back, hundreds of pipes form a 3D sculpture worthy of Marcel Duchamp.
In fact sound — whether from sermons or choirs or pipe organs — is an important design consideration, another factor that determines the look and feel of a sanctuary. Acousticians talk about the necessity of “diffusion,” the way sound should be dispersed evenly through a space by utilizing a variety of angles along with reflective and absorptive materials.
Zecchetto said it is tricky to balance the pure unamplified sound of singing and praying with the amplified voices of priests and ministers. At St. Thomas More, for instance, wood lattices along walls and ceilings modulate both sound and light. At other churches, acoustic elements that may seem purely decorative include fabrics, carpets, upholstery, paintings and sculpture. And let’s not forget the people, who come in all shapes and sizes and whether standing or seated, contribute to the ways in which sounds travel through space.
For contemplation, many San Diego sanctuaries are open to the public, while others can be appreciated only from outside. There is almost nothing online about that Buddhist temple in East San Diego, but a neighbor said it holds regular services. Regardless, its wildly colored decorative art gives the area a lofty boost.
Meanwhile, San Diego’s spectacular Mormon Temple, with its golden Angel Moroni atop a spire visible from Interstate 5 near La Jolla, is not for public use, yet has huge public impact. Viewed by thousands of motorists each day, it makes its mark, and that presence is likely to outlive all of us. The structure was designed to stand for at least a millennium, its architect William S. Lewis, Jr. told me in 1990, so it might well be there after everything around it has crumbled into the Pacific.
Sutro writes about architecture and design. He is the author of the guidebook “San Diego Architecture” as well as “University of California San Diego: An Architectural Guide.” He wrote a column about architecture for the San Diego edition of the Los Angeles Times back in the day and has also covered architecture for a variety of design publications.
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