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Parish House and Chancel for Christ Church
Purcell and Feick
Eau Claire, Wisconsin 1908
Parabiographies entry, Volume for 1908
Text by William Gray Purcell
Job Date (in Parabiographies entry): April 27, 1908
CHRIST CHURCH, Eau Claire, Wisconsin
This job was a poser for a young fellow fired up with Louis H. Sullivan fuel and deeply convinced of the need for indigenous American architecture.
Another Kind of Tradition
It was plain from the first contact that we could not lead the rector, Mr. Lindley, and his vestry of prosperous lumbermen, any distance at all toward unfamiliar forms. It was also plan that life within this building would carry on in an ancient pattern that itself changed very slowly - and could be changed by talk not at all. Within eighteen months of starting my independent career as an architect and with an all too small amount of practical office experience, either in business or design, we faced a major decision with respect to that type of building which is farthest removed from the march of events and contemporary thought. (Religion kept the stone knives for animal sacrifice long after men had knives and swords and arrow points of bronze.
Builder Honesty
We decided to search among historical ecclesiastical forms for the very simplest, most primitive way of putting masonry around Christian worship, and of forming its simplest need for window openings and doors. An important consideration was the saving in cost which this promised, and at the very least, to have nothing but genuine materials and methods, none of the tin and lumber Gothic of the time.
Engineering
A form of roof truss was chosen that was good engineering but not too bridgey - the scissors truss - a type that sprang from old, old carpentry, and which lies concealed and often frustrated, under much carved overlay in many a building since 1492, and where the wood carvings of their members and added false members are often taken from stone forms rather than wood.
These trusses turned out to be a bit too heavy in the Parish House - they rather "sit on one's head" - and they are bit too "lumbery" in the church - a bit too much influenced by the Gustav Stickley "craftsman-fumed-oak" period which was at its height in 1910. These characteristics are, however, not unduly conspicuous to the public of today. It is rather shadowy up there in the roof and some robustness is good.
George Feick was very careful to provide roller slide ways for truss movement behind the coping and to put pans under the gutters to guard against the very troublesome spring ice and leaks on the roof. We kept the walls low and made the buttresses truly functional, kept all details of brackets, caps, bases, and moldings very primitive.
Utilities
For window openings we went back to the simplest lancet types, studying the ideas and history of Early English church architecture rather than any particular dorms. When I got the sense and feel of it all, I made my own re-combinations of the single unit, with a trefoil, to produce the pair, trying many different spacings and joinings. In all this this study, there was a sincere effort to try to reproduce in myself the mental attitude with which a master mason architect of 1150 would have come to such a problem. I wanted to arrive at the primitive and honest-hearted, even awkward qualities of early work, not by archaism but by inward conviction.
We then joined the pairs into groups with a wheel for the great window at the east, and developed a system for reglets and rebates for glass, etc., keeping all as structural as possible, as strong as possible, and as dead simple in pattern as possible. The final details were then checked back to photographs and drawings of Early English church buildings. We found none just to match, but also found that nothing curious or out of step had been done.
The Masters Also Did It
Having stuck to a material honesty but otherwise departing from the more aggressive creative thesis of Sullivan and Wright, we nevertheless felt well satisfied, recalling that the Master, "L.H.S." himself was at one time very "Romanesque," following after Richardson, in the Chicago Auditorium - and that Wright in his Nathan G. Moore house in Oak Park (first dwelling by him after leaving Sullivan in 1896) was very "English" in a lot of detail and basic forms - even to a lot of half-timber panelling, diagonal panes of leaded glass, Tudor arches, traditional panel doors and wainscots.
Well, Christ Church is structurally and materially honest - was personally a sincere effort to go as far back to idea sources as seemed fitting and bring out processes rather than forms - and all the work was related to methods of craftsmanship, tools, and men, which were apposite to that time and place. The building made everyone happy and it satisfied those who came to use it.
The acoustics at first were not good - too much reverberation - but a surface of celotex on the ceiling between structural panels rectified this and the change from plaster panels to fiber did not seriously disturb the appearance.
Collection: William Gray Purcell Papers, Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota [AR:B4d1.2]
research courtesy mark hammons