by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a multi-faith chapel on a Christian college campus?

Summary: Julia Thompson Smith Chapel is a non-denominational, multi-faith religious space that generates its sense of spiritual reverence not through narrative and specific iconography, but through transcendent, experiential features. Heavily influenced by his former mentor Fay Jones, Maurice Jennings’ design for the chapel recalls Jones’ contextually humble approach to architecture.

Largely devoid of formal religious references and wholly informed by site context, the Julia Thompson Smith Chapel on the campus of Agnes Scott College is an experiential celebration of spirituality fit for a multitude of religions. Though it sits on a Presbyterian college campus, the chapel is a non-denominational and multi-faith religious space, and its designers, Maurice Jennings Architects—protégés of AIA Gold Medal winner Fay Jones, use a few of the master’s words to describe their mission for the building.

“The guiding principle, as Fay used to say, is to make a space where people can come and think their best thoughts, and sort of leave it at that,” says Walter Jennings, Assoc. AIA, the building’s project manager.

Agnes Scott College is a small liberal arts women’s school in Decatur, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. The 4,000-square-foot Julia Thompson Smith Chapel sits on a sloped quad, with walkout entryways at the lower level, where a small multi-faith meditation room is, and at the higher level, where the main sanctuary is. To be able to facilitate services for a wide range of faiths, neither of the rooms has permanently arranged pews or seating. The project began with a partnership between two of Jones’ primary disciples, Maurice Jennings, AIA, and David McKee, AIA. But, in 2006, while the building was still in preliminary design, McKee left the firm to begin his own firm and Jennings and his Fayetteville, Ark.-based practice completed the design. The chapel was dedicated on April 21 and is expected to open in May.

The experience
Julia Thompson Smith Chapel is deeply contextual in terms of material and form. The Agnes Scott campus is largely made of brick and a Neo-Gothic design language, and brick is also the chapel’s primary material. The east and west elevations are framed by arched stucco cladding that covers the top portion of the sanctuary entryway. Walter Jennings likens the double-layered slate roof to “a saddle blanket” and says the shed roof reinforces the Gothic symmetry of the building, which is organized around a 3x3-foot grid. The roof also “helps in drawing the eye upward, which we thought was very important in a sacred space,” he says. Seven skylights cut into the roof echo the Gothic arches below.

The arches that define the chapel’s interior space extend through the glass-walled north and south elevations out onto balconies as brick fins. The warm woods used in the interiors and the open arced spaces of the sanctuary enhance the chapel’s sense of spiritual reverence. Light from the skylights above and windows below make the white stucco-like gypsum that covers the interior arches glow. The chapel has no steeple, no crosses, and no crucifixes and instead opts for pleasingly abstract stained glass. Its fundamental Gothic vocabulary is perhaps its most formal religious reference. The Julia Thompson Smith Chapel does not become a sacred space by referring to religious narratives or specific iconography. All of its purely experiential features—the light; the open, arced space; the building’s implied skyward ascent—generate the chapel’s aura of peace and spiritual meditation.

A singular story
Consistent with this experiential language, the chapel has much less ornamentation than a typical Gothic or Neo-Gothic religious space, and it also has far more brick and less glass than other chapels that Maurice Jennings Architects has done—especially when compared to the master text of this small-scaled design sensibility: Fay Jones’ Thorncrown Temple in Eureka Springs, Ark. Thorncrown’s latticed geometeries of pure glass in rural Arkansas won the 2006 AIA Twenty-five Year Award.

Jones’ work has often been labeled Ozark Gothic or Contemporary Gothic, but this appropriation obscures key sensibilities that separate the grand-scaled, forceful imposition of awe of Gothic architecture and the humble contextualism and connection to nature of Jones’ Arkansas-based oeuvre. The Agnes Scott chapel does share the humble and reverent scale of Jones’ buildings. This body of work exists largely outside the late 20th-century debates that pitted Modernists vs. Postmodernists, Whites vs. Grays, and his best work could make these arguments seem superfluous and banal. A singular figure, Jones is hard to connect to any architectural narrative beyond the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he studied and for whom he worked.

The small craft
Four people, including his son Walter, work in Maurice Jennings’ firm. They still do preliminary drawings by hand. The Agnes Scott chapel was the first time they’d ever used a computer to complete construction documents. Like Jones, they intentionally specialize in only a few small building types—homes, chapels, churches. Maurice Jennings, who worked with Jones for 25 years, says this is so his firm can be intimately involved in all phases of design and construction. “There’s kind of a limit to the size of projects that you can do [that] with, in-house in a small firm,” he says.

And, like Jones, the mastery of humbly scaled places of reverence brings its own quiet popularity. “We get asked to do what we’re known for,” says Walter Jennings.