D.C. Church Sues Over Landmark Status

According to an article appearing in Friday’s edition of the New York Times (Church Sues Over Landmark Status), the Third Church of Christ, Scientist (located near the White House), filed suit against Washington, D.C., on Thursday, accusing the city of violating the church’s religious freedom by declaring it’s building a historic landmark and refusing to allow church leaders to tear it down.

The church building presents a study in the old saying, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  To some people, the building, a stark structure with walls that soar toward the sky, is an eyesore; to others, it is a work of genius.  The 37-year-old building was designed by Araldo A. Cossutta, who had been an architect in I.M. Pei’s modernist architecture firm, and was declared a historic landmark by the city in December 2008.

According to the New York Times, supporters of preserving the building say it is a sterling example of a style of architecture called brutalism, identified by repetitive geometric design and raw concrete.  However, J. Darrow Kirkpatrick, the church’s former first reader or lay leader, contends that the building is expensive to heat and that it costs up to $8,000 a year to change the light bulbs because scaffolding must be erected to do so.  According to Mr. Kirkpatrick, most of the church’s nearly 400 seats are empty for services, and the concrete is so porous that the smell of mildew lingers.

“We believe this brutalist, unwelcoming, bunkerlike building is not a proper representation of our practice or our theology and, that without a compelling government interest, our members, not the Historic Preservation Review Board, are in the best position to determine that representation,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said Thursday in announcing the lawsuit at a news conference.

However, David Maloney, state historic preservation officer for the District of Columbia, has countered that although it is unusual for such a recent building to be declared historic, officials felt that it was an important architectural statement.  According to Maloney:

Third Church is a rare Modernist church in the city, and the complex possesses amazingly high integrity (in all respects: location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling and association), down to the original carpeting and seat upholstery in the church auditorium.

Meanwhile, Eric C. Rassbach, litigation director for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit group assisting the church, has stated that the dispute is about more than architecture.  According to Rassbach, “The city is saying you must keep the forbidding concrete wall, and the church is saying we want to reach out to people.  This case tees up whether historic preservation can trump the right to worship.”

VEJ