Love Thy Neighbor, Modern Style

Who says Christianity and consumer culture don’t mix? Not the Rev. Robert H. Schuller. Back in the 1950s, while most suburbanites were still attending services in clapboard churches, the future televangelist was preaching in a drive-in theater. Within a few years, he had discovered the hypnotic powers of television and was beaming his message directly into suburban living rooms. At its peak, his show, “The Hour of Power,” reached about 2 million Americans a week.

So it may surprise some people that in the past half-century Schuller has become one of Southern California’s most important patrons of mainstream modern architecture. In 1959, he commissioned Richard Neutra, then a pillar of the Modern movement, to design a sleek church building whose sliding glass walls opened onto a parking lot. A decade later, he hired Philip Johnson to design the Crystal Cathedral. To Schuller, Modern design, like the color TV and the automobile, was simply another tool for proselytizing to the suburban masses.

The new $20-million Hospitality Center at the Crystal Cathedral, which broke ground in March and is scheduled for completion in 2003, is the final jewel in that architectural setting. Designed by Richard Meier, the architect of the Getty Center, it will house an exhibition space, cafe, bookstore and auditorium as well as Schuller’s corporate boardroom. Its cylindrical form, with layered surfaces that are cut away to flood the building with light, has a crisp, modern appeal.

But Meier’s design is more reactionary in spirit than its predecessors. His task, as he saw it, was to design not only a powerful work of architecture, but also to provide the communal tissue that the complex so desperately lacks. His tools--plazas, courtyards and pedestrian pathways--could not be more traditional. The result is an odd blend of old and new themes, and a vision of urban planning that is as compelling as any of the individual buildings.

When Neutra was hired by Schuller in 1959, the architect’s best designs were behind him. Nonetheless, his Community Church, completed in 1961, is a significant work. Its most interesting feature is a row of sliding glass walls that open onto a fan-shaped parking lot, allowing the minister to preach simultaneously to worshipers seated in the pews and those reclining outside in their cars. But the building’s form and materials--a long rectangular box of flagstone, steel and stucco--lack Neutra’s typical elegance.

Schuller had better luck with Johnson. By the late 1970s, the minister’s sermons were being beamed across the country, and Johnson’s glass cathedral was conceived more as a backdrop for the TV cameras than for those attending services in Garden Grove. The result was high drama: a gigantic glass star whose odd, angular forms and shimmering surfaces make it one of Johnson’s best works.

To a degree, Meier’s building takes its cues from those earlier structures. The cylindrical exterior is intended to complement the strong geometric forms of the Johnson and Neutra buildings. The aluminum panels and vast expanses of glass echo Johnson’s glass-and-aluminum facades.

But the design is also a reaction against those earlier visions. Instead of creating an isolated object amid a sea of parking, Meier set his building slightly apart from the others, enclosing a generous pedestrian plaza at the center of the site. Visitors will filter into the plaza from parking on all sides.

The precedents for such a planning scheme are not found in 1950s Los Angeles; they are the cozy plazas and open-air courtyards of Renaissance Italy. They come from a time when peasants traveled on foot or, if they were lucky, on the back of an animal. Communities were less mobile, more cohesive. (These interests are not new to Meier. At the Getty, for instance, he went to great pains to make the car invisible.)

In that same spirit, the Hospitality Center is conceived as a compact social machine. A formal pedestrian axis cuts through the building, leading from the parking in the back to the lobby and out to the plaza. Inside, the cylindrical space is broken down into distinct segments. Light spills down through a three-story well that seems carved out of the upper floors. Along one side, a third of the lobby floor is sliced away, revealing an enormous glass wall and a long, switchback stair that connects down to a sunken, open-air court.

By contrast, the building’s south facade--which houses the exhibition spaces and offices--seems cloaked in darkness, shielded behind a large aluminum screen pierced by a few, small slot windows.

The play between light and dark--a central theme in all Meier works--is sure to produce a wonderful chiaroscuro effect, as shadows slip across the building’s white, interior surfaces. It also serves a practical purpose: While restaurant patrons work on their tans, the books and artworks will remain protected from damage by the harsh southern light.

But it is its pure geometric form that gives the building a religious aura, even if its primary function is to accommodate growing bands of visiting tourists. To believers, its taut, circular exterior will conjure the perfect symmetry of God’s universe. To skeptics, it may evoke the rigid order of church dogma.

To the architect, Meier’s design is a testament to his profession’s 50-year struggle to cope with the perceived erosion of the civic fabric. Right or wrong, Modern planning methods have long been cited as a cause of social alienation. Meier’s response has been to reintroduce old-fashioned urban elements to the mix.

As such, when the Garden Grove complex opens, it will be one of the few places where the entire arc of that particular history will be on display. Think of it as a parable for the highs and lows of American architecture’s attitudes toward the car--from Neutra’s unconditional love to Johnson’s casual acceptance to Meier’s studied distance. Suburbia, it seems, is showing a little gray.