Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.’s Famed Wayfarers Chapel Is in Danger

For more than 70 years, Wayfarers Chapel—a celebrated example of organic modernism designed by Lloyd Wright, son of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright—has sat on a picturesque bluff high above the Pacific Ocean in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. With its mostly glass exterior showcasing the towering redwoods outside, the chapel has attracted hundreds of thousands of annual visitors, some of whom come to attend one of the 400 or so weddings held there each year.

In mid-February, however, the chapel closed to visitors and canceled all upcoming weddings, saying the recently designated National Historic Landmark has become unstable thanks to the 260-acre Portuguese Bend landslide, which has been slow-moving for years but really started to pick up momentum in recent months thanks to heavy rain in the area. The landslide’s movement has both threatened and destroyed local homes and restaurants in recent years, but now it’s looking like it could take out the chapel if something’s not done soon. The chapel’s directors created a $250,000 GoFundMe seeking to raise funds for geological study and slide remediation, but that amount is only a drop in the bucket compared to what they may ultimately need.

"Classic California"

First opened in 1951, the 100-seat chapel was commissioned by the Swedenborgian Church of North America, though a significant amount of the site’s money and attention has historically come from outside its congregation. Actors Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay were married in the chapel in 1958, as were Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson and his beloved Melinda Ledbetter in 1995. It’s been featured in shows like The O.C., Lucifer, Revenge, and even The Bachelorette (all for wedding scenes), and True Detective (as the site of a fictitious hippie commune), and has captured the hearts of modernism fanatics for years. "There’s really no place like Wayfarers Chapel," says Adrian Fine, president of the Los Angeles Conservancy. "It’s classic California in terms of the experience, because you’re looking up through the trees and there are no other places that evoke that special feeling, which is why this is especially distressing."

Alan Hess, an architect and historian who calls Lloyd Wright "the most important unheralded architect in Southern California modernism," says that the chapel is an absolute masterpiece, appealing to professional architects and the general public in equal measure. Lloyd Wright trained as a landscape architect while he was working with Irving J. Gill, another Southern California architectural icon. Wright became a regular architect when he decided to go out on his own, but Wayfarers Chapel is a good example of how he frequently managed to blend the indoors and out, capturing not just the beauty of the building’s interior, but also of the way the trees move or of how the sun’s rays come through the glass at different times of the day. "Buildings that embrace the beauties of nature are always going to be popular with the general public," says Hess, "and the way Wright did it, with this glass enclosure, was brilliant. The structural elements are curved and seem natural, and they inform the building’s stonework in a way that makes you feel like you’re connecting with the outdoors."

Though the site played into Wright’s interests and strengths as a modern architect, it seems to have always been fundamentally unsound for long-term building. According to Dana Graham, president of the Palos Verdes Historical Society, the Portuguese Bend landslide is due to a three-foot-wide band of slippery, volcanic bentonite clay that sits about 30 feet underground. "The stuff is like Teflon when it gets wet," Graham says, noting that, when there was a drought a few years back, signs of the slide seemed to temporarily halt.

At the chapel, the sliding land has meant a shifting infrastructure. Though Wayfarers has lost structures due to the slide before—namely a visitor center in the early ’80s—the damage really started accelerating last summer, when Reverend Dan Burchett, executive director of Wayfarers Chapel, says "everything started moving much quicker." The slide has since caused breaks in the foundations of the chapel and its office structure, as well as cracks in the copper wiring that supplies the radiant heating beneath the chapel floor. Burchett says because of that instability, the Wayfarers team has lived without heat in their buildings for the past few months, as they can’t rely on the integrity of the gas line.

Though the chapel’s office structure was built in 2000, with construction standards that are much more current than what you might find in the sanctuary, it’s still subject to that shifting land. "We’re seeing the entire structure being pushed," says Burchett. "There are breaks in the walls, breaks in the walkway, and we’ve had to remove the stairway to our main entrance because it was cracking and heaving. There isn’t a single interior door left that closes the way it’s supposed to, and in the chapel, we’ve had a total of about eight glass [pane] breakages in just the past seven months, when normally we get one break about every couple of years."

All of that movement isn’t just dangerous—it’s expensive. "I have substantial invoices coming across my desk for geologists and survey companies and general contracting companies," Burchett explains. "I paid $131,000 in February for cement work that had to be done because of the breaking all around us and we spent $30,000 on asphalt over a period of eight weeks or so in recent months, too. These types of bills continue happening. I had 29 employees when I took this job, and I’ve got five now. We’re down to bare bones and all we can do is just try to hold on to everything until the land stops."

In the Palos Verdes community, there’s been discussion for years about how to slow the slide, or how to effectively remove moisture from that clay. With periods of torrential rain and extreme weather only increasing in recent years, it’s only become more pressing. "It’s increasingly not uncommon to deal with something like this with historic buildings," says Fine. "We have to adapt to a changing environment, and sometimes that means moving buildings or raising them or trying some type of other retrofit."

"Every part of the country has its issue that it’s dealing with in terms of how the climate is changing," he adds. "We all should be thinking about what that actually means long term, what buildings can adapt and what buildings can’t, and where we should be building in the future. We’re seeing this kind of land movement issue more and more, and it’s going to impact not just Wayfarers, but also other historic buildings that people care about, so we need to be planning ahead."