The First Unitarian Church of Rochester building is located at 220 Winton Road South in Rochester, New York, U.S. Designed by Louis Kahn for the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, a Unitarian Universalist Association congregation, it was completed in 1962. Kahn completed a major extension to the building in 1969. Another small addition was completed in 1996.
The building was described in 1982 as one of "the most significant works of religious architecture of this century" by Paul Goldberger, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning architectural critic. Its exterior is characterized by deeply folded brick walls created by a series of thin, two-story light hoods that shield windows from direct sunlight. The sanctuary's complex ceiling has light towers in each corner to bring in indirect natural light.
The story of the design process that Kahn followed at First Unitarian has been described as "almost classic in architectural history and theory". Kahn began by creating what he called a Form drawing to represent the essence of what he intended to build. He drew a square to represent the sanctuary, and around the square he drew concentric circles to indicate an ambulatory, a corridor, and the church school. In the center he placed a question mark to represent his understanding that, in his words, "the form realization of Unitarian activity was bound around that which is Question. Question eternal of why anything."
Background
The congregation of First Unitarian Church of Rochester voted in January 1959 to sell its existing building in downtown in Rochester, New York, with the understanding that they could continue to occupy it until July 1961. Construction activity by the developers who bought it, however, soon weakened the building, forcing the congregation to move in September, 1959. The church held Sunday services at the a temporary location until a new building could be constructed.
First Unitarian's previous building was architecturally significant, having been designed by Richard Upjohn, a prominent nineteenth-century architect and the first president of the American Institute of Architects. The church decided to replace it with a building designed "by a leading 20th century architect, giving the community a notable example of contemporary architecture."
Choosing an architect
The search committee, formed of church members who were knowledgeable about architecture, decided to focus on prominent architects who had established relatively small offices and did most of the creative work themselves. They contacted six architects. Frank Lloyd Wright expressed little interest and his fees were high. (Wright died shortly afterward at the age of 91.) Eero Saarinen was considered but was unable to take the job because of his time constraints. The committee also met with Paul Rudolph, Walter Gropius, and Carl Koch. They spent a day with Louis Kahn in May 1959 and were impressed by his philosophical approach, the atmosphere in his office, the assurance that he would personally be in charge of the design, his respect for the integrity of materials, and the perception that his architecture, while modern, had an emotional depth and a connection to the past.
Robin B. Williams, writing in Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, says Kahn appealed to them also because of "the high compatibility of his philosophy with Unitarian ideas". Robert McCarter, one of Kahn's biographers, notes parallels between Kahn's ideas and those in the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a transcendalist who was an important figure in Unitarian history. Committee members said they were convinced that Kahn was "a natural Unitarian." Kahn, who came from a non-observant Jewish background, was spiritual in a way that been described as "pan-religious" by Carter Wiseman, one of his biographers. When working on projects in India and Bangladesh, for example, he developed an affinity with the spirituality he found there. Kahn's architecture reflected his spirituality. David Rineheart, who worked for Kahn, said, "for Lou, every building was a temple. Salk was a temple for science. Dhaka was a temple for government. Exeter was a temple for learning."
Kahn's social and political outlook also was compatible with that of the Rochester congregation and its history of concern with social issues. During the Great Depression Kahn worked with labor unions and civic agencies to design inexpensive housing. He worked as assistant architect on the Jersey Homesteads, a project to resettle Jewish garment workers from New York City and Philadelphia to a kibbutz-like rural collective that combined farming and manufacturing. During the presidential election of 1948, Kahn worked with the third-party campaign of Henry A. Wallace, who ran on the Progressive Party ticket.
Kahn gave a philosophical presentation of his ideas to a congregational meeting in June 1959, after which the church commissioned him to design their new building. During that same visit Kahn helped choose the site to be purchased for the new building. The church hired Kahn just as his career was entering a new stage that would bring him increased attention. Later that year Kahn was chosen to design the Salk Institute, and in 1962 he was selected to design the National Assembly complex for what would become the capital of the new nation of Bangladesh.
Design process
The story of the design process at First Unitarian, including Kahn's creation of what he called a Form drawing, "is almost classic in architectural history and theory" according to Katrine Lotz, a professor at the School of Architecture of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Kahn's approach was to design each building as if it were the first of its kind. August Komendant, a structural engineer who worked closely with Kahn, said that during the initial design stages Kahn wrestled with questions like "How would one design a Unitarian Church? What is the Unitarian religion?" and studied Unitarianism thoroughly. The result sometimes confounded expectations. When the completed First Unitarian Church was shown at an architectural exhibition in the Soviet Union, the mayor of Leningrad commented that it did not look like a church. (Kahn jokingly responded, "That's why it was chosen for exhibition in the Soviet Union.")
The church's building committee provided Kahn with information from questionnaires filled out by church members to indicate what they desired from their new building. These questionnaires went beyond normal fact-gathering about functional requirements to include aspects of the Unitarian faith that the building should express. Among other things, they said, the new building should be supportive of the broader community and should express "the dignity rather than the depravity of man."
The congregation's broad approach to the statement of requirements was similar to Kahn's philosophical approach to architectural design. Kahn explained this approach in Form and Design, an article he wrote while working on this project. Using the First Unitarian Church of Rochester as an example, Kahn said, "A great building, in my opinion, must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable ... But what is unmeasurable is the psychic spirit." Kahn associated the unmeasurable with what he called Form, saying that, "Form is not design, not a shape, not a dimension. It is not a material thing." "Form ... characterizes a harmony of spaces good for a certain activity of man."
When Kahn addressed the congregational meeting that voted to hire him, he explained his approach by creating what he called a Form drawing, which, he said, was not to be understood as an architectural design. He drew a square that represented the sanctuary, and around the square he placed concentric circles representing an ambulatory, a corridor and the church school. In the center of the square he placed a question mark that, he explained on another occasion, represented his understanding that "the form realization of Unitarian activity was bound around that which is Question. Question eternal of why anything."
Kahn delivered his first design in December 1959, proposing a square building three stories high with four-story towers in each corner. The sanctuary was a square area in the middle of a large twelve-sided room at the center of the building. The remainder of the near-circular room was an ambulatory space that was to be screened from the sanctuary. Kahn said, "The ambulatory I felt necessary because the Unitarian Church is made up of people who have had previous beliefs ... So I drew the ambulatory to respect the fact that what is being said or what is felt in a sanctuary was not necessarily something you have to participate in. And so you could walk and feel free to walk away from what is being said." Kahn had developed the idea for this type of ambulatory prior to his work on First Unitarian, referring to it during a talk in 1957 in the context of a university chapel.
The central room was to be capped by a complex dome and encircled by a corridor outside its walls that would provide connections to the three-story church school on the periphery of the building. Pupils in the school would be able to observe church services from open spaces above.
Prompted by complaints about the cost, which was several times the amount that had been budgeted, Kahn quickly dropped one story from the proposed building. The committee, however, was also unhappy with other aspects of the design, such as its inflexibility and shortage of useful classroom space, the irregularly shaped rooms on the periphery created by the placement of a large, near-circular room within a square building, and the potential for services to be disturbed by children listening above and by people drifting in and out of the sanctuary. In February 1960, Helen Williams, the chair of the building committee, wrote to Kahn saying "we are not in any measure happy with the present concept which you have given us," and a week later she wrote, "We remain steadfast in the conclusion that we must have an entirely new concept". Stating that "Kahn has failed us miserably", Williams resigned in frustration from the building committee shortly afterward.
Kahn agreed to create a new design, much to the relief of the building committee, who feared that he would demand payment for work performed and walk away from the commission. For his new design Kahn proposed a building that was loosely elongated rather than rigidly square. He resisted suggestions to place classrooms in a separate wing to reduce the potential for services to be disturbed by boisterous children, retaining the concept of surrounding the sanctuary with the church school. Kahn eliminated the ambulatory space inside the sanctuary walls but retained the corridor just outside to provide access to the classrooms. This PhD dissertation has useful images from the design process, including the Form diagram.
The roof over the sanctuary was one of the last aspects of the design to be completed. One option would have been to span the sanctuary with a steel frame, but Kahn had decided in the early 1950s that he would no longer use such structures, preferring the more monumental appearance he could achieve with materials like concrete and brick. Not entirely satisfied with the roof design he had developed, Kahn asked August Komendant for suggestions. Komendant, his most important collaborator, was a structural engineer and a pioneer in the use of pre-stressed concrete, which can be used to create lighter and more graceful structures than regular concrete. Komendant kept Kahn's general layout of the roof but redesigned it as a folded-plate structure of pre-stressed concrete that would require support only at its edges, eliminating the need for the massive concrete beams that Kahn had been planning to use as supports for the roof structure.