Thorncrown Chapel
Interesting facts
- Fay Jones nicknamed the chapel's style Ozark Gothic.
- The only steel in the structure forms a diamond-shaped pattern where the wooden trusses cross.
- The chapel is built mostly from ordinary pine boards, and its trusses were assembled on the floor and then raised into place.
- At night, reflections of the crossed timbers in the glass seem to surround the whole building.
- In a poll of American Institute of Architects members it was ranked fourth among the buildings of the 20th century.
- Fay Jones is the only one of Frank Lloyd Wright's apprentices to have received the AIA Gold Medal, awarded to him in 1990.
- For all its height, the chapel's floor plan measures just 24 by 60 feet, roughly 7 by 18 metres.
- Since it opened in 1980 the chapel has welcomed more than nine million visitors.
- It won an AIA National Honor Award in 1981, just a year after completion.
Why it is worth it
Thorncrown Chapel is a house of glass standing in an Ozark forest. Its timber frame rises 48 feet (about 15 metres) among the trees, and its walls are almost entirely windows: 425 of them, over 6,000 square feet of glass, so that from inside the woods seem to be the true walls and the crossed wooden braces overhead read like branches. The architect was E. Fay Jones, who had apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright, and the building carries the Prairie School's horizontal calm and love of natural materials into something taller and lighter. It was completed in 1980 near Eureka Springs, in the hills of northwestern Arkansas.
The chapel began with one man's idea. Jim Reed, a retired schoolteacher, bought the wooded hillside in 1971 and wanted a non-denominational chapel there, a place set apart for quiet reflection rather than a parish church. Jones took his cue from the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the thirteenth-century royal chapel whose walls dissolve into stained glass and which was built to hold the Crown of Thorns acquired by Louis IX. That relic gave Thorncrown its name, and the Gothic chapel its central idea: a structure reduced to a slender frame so that light does the rest.
Jones also set himself a rule that shaped the whole design. To spare the site, no structural member could be bigger than two people could carry through the woods, so there are no heavy beams or cranes here, only modest lengths of pressure-treated southern pine assembled into a lattice of trusses. Flagstone, local to the region, paves the floor and forms the low surrounding wall. The building looks like an open pavilion but is fully enclosed and seats around a hundred people. Recognition came early: in 2000 it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, decades before the usual fifty-year threshold, and in 2006 the American Institute of Architects gave it its Twenty-five Year Award, reserved for buildings that have stood the test of time. Jones later designed a similar chapel, the Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel, in nearby Bella Vista.
Getting there
Thorncrown Chapel stands on U.S. Highway 62 just west of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The city of Rogers lies about 33 km to the west in a straight line. The nearest airport is Northwest Arkansas National Airport (XNA), about 50 km away, reached by road via Highway 62.
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From the encyclopaedia
Thorncrown Chapel was designed by E. Fay Jones and constructed in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in 1980. The design recalls the Prairie School of architecture popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom Jones had apprenticed. The chapel was commissioned by Jim Reed, a retired schoolteacher who envisioned a non-denominational pilgrimage chapel set apart for meditation. The design was inspired by Sainte-Chapelle, a Gothic church in Paris pierced by numerous stained glass windows. It held some of King Louis IX's medieval Christian relics, including the Crown of Thorns believed to have been worn by Christ. This relic inspired the name of the American chapel.
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