My journey south is, in one sense, a pilgrimage to the Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas built by architect E. Fay Jones in 1980.  Thorncrown is one of those buildings that both architects and real people adore, like the Guggenheim in New York.  It’s unlike a lot of canonical contemporary buildings in that it’s small, religious, and in an out-of-the-way (for the architectural establishment, at least) place.  And that’s a lot of what intrigued me.  After working in architecture offices in New York, where I administered projects in places as far away as the Middle East and Asia, I’m eager to find a way to build that’s more attuned to place and culture, and also more pragmatic.

In published photographs Thorncrown is all glorious geometries, symmetries and connections, an architect’s technical drawings sprung to life and set, for maximum drama, on a stone bed in the woods.  Seeing the chapel in person for the first time left a different impression.  The structure seemed less like a building, less architectural in spirit, than like an apparatus, instrumental in spirit.  And there is a spirit there, a dazzling transparency that collapses layers of space (the space within the building, the space between the trees, the space of the sky) on one another.  The building is materially overstructured, with redundant framing, braces and trusses.  And yet as one steps inside the figure of the building vanishes, leaving a visitor standing up against, and yet also carefully distanced from, the elements.  I want to know how this building does all that it does.