- Our Building continued
-
- There followed a description of Our Faith,
Our Heritage, and Our Cultural Crisis and
Position in
- Time. Some of the significant items were
these: We believe that creative architecture will
make people aware of the resources of our
Christian faith. Men thirst for God and are
particularly desperate in our time. For many
people God is transcendent and distant. Our
building ought then to reflect the intimacy and
eminence of God as well as his majesty. Man, if
we correctly evaluate his predicament, feels
incomplete, fragmentary, and anxious. Our church
ought then to enhance his desire for wholeness,
and develop his capacity to fulfill his divine
destiny and confirm his nature as a potential
child of God.
- Ray Welles writes that the document had not been
requested by Mr. Wright, but he responded to our
"little church" because of the quality
of that statement.
- It should be noted that Mr. Wright himself did
not come to Redding, but three of his associates
did John Rattenbury and Tony Puttnam of Taliesin
West, and Aaron Green of the San Francisco office,
with whom the committee had the most contact.
Tony Puttnam lived here on the site supervising
construction for many months. All three continue
their interest to this day.
Committee members traveled to the city to meet Mr.
Wright when his renderings for the Marin Civic
Center were made public. As Ray Welles recalls, Meeting
Frank Lloyd Wright was quite a thrill. He was
exceedingly deferential to this young minister. I
was about as naive as he was arrogant, but he
reached across and tapped my knee as we sat in a
tight circle in Aaron's office and said, "Well,
Domini," a familiar Scottish term for a reverend "how long
do you suppose we'll keep building churches?"
Obviously, a spirited conversation followed, and
we had to work at getting back to the reason for
which we came.
The Rev. Welles writes further, When Clayton
Kantz and I went to Taliesin West at his
invitation, we were thrilled out of our skulls.
Mr. Wright walked us through his design studios,
introducing a number of his students, stopping
before three different designs of churches. One
was for a Christian Science church and bore the
proportions and flavor of a cool, intellectual,
precise plan he felt echoed the personality of
that religion. Then he turned to our presentation drawings
and said, 'Now, your faith has emotion in it, and
so does your building'.
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