Recently, through a Google image search I ran on this image, I learned of a building in Wheaton that was repurposed from a factory to a church. Here’s a snippet of a story about the transformation: “Wheaton church transforms old factory into new home“:
The original factory was designed by David Haid, the architect behind the glass house in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Haid was part of an architectural school that focused on simplicity, favoring large open spaces and simple columns, said Dave Skiffington, lead architect behind the redesign.
“It was designed with much larger, open spaces than a typical manufacturing space,” said Skiffington, owner of Skiffington Architects, Ltd., in Hawthorn Woods.
Haid also used natural materials, such as wood, iron and glass, and left them exposed to show how the building was constructed, something the church tried to honor in the redesign, Ruch said.
The east side of the church is made of glass, giving both the church’s narthex — an architectural term for lobby — and second floor offices a very open feel.
Windows also form part of the south wall of the sanctuary, letting in natural sunlight during the church’s morning services.
This is a rare path— from a secular use to a religious one. Usually it is the other way around. For spring break 2014, for instance, my fambly stayed in a former synagogue:
This place and others is chronicled in the comprehensive book, “The Lost Synagogues of Manhattan“.
But when I was presented with a brilliant building that took the opposite path, I had to see it. I spend a lot of my time in Wheaton, and a lot of it walking, and I wanted to see this place that managed to confound my land-use expectations (“wait there used to be a factory in the middle of a residential area in Wheaton?”) and confirm them (“oh, there’s a church in Wheaton”) at the same time.
After lunch at the best Vietnamese restaurant in the tri-state area, I took an unsteady, circuitous path to the church.
Nestled on a dead-end street near the railroad tracks and a forest preserve, it’s an odd spot, but logical to planners. Standing among it, you can see decisions laid bare— “this is where apartment people get to live, in a low-slung complex that mimics motels”.
“We’ll put the lumber and gravel supply here, where no one of means has to be bothered by its roughness and dust”.
“We’ll need somewhere for workers to park— butt it up against the train tracks.”
And we can see the vast empty lot in an otherwise full-up suburb, big grass where no one wants their mansion, like a couple paragraphs of copy that didn’t make it onto the newspaper page.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, because we’re here in M-1 territory:
But I was stunned to encounter where Wile E. Coyote got all his screws:
And there it is, in the middle of all this, a genius building devoted to the Resurrection of someone who lived far away, a long time ago.
Trees frame the approach, like a depth-of-field elementary school proscenium.
Crisp steel lines or glass and steel that sit on top of a tall stack of plain yellow bricks. It’s like a van der Rohe for corporate privacy, hiding worker behavior but making certain they get light.
Retrofit chandeliers match lines and add ornament.
Wild branches against southern wall.
A set of three front doors, hidden in plain sight, inset and canopy, shadow in mid-day.
Happy Easter.
