Growing up, my parents would drag my sister and me on long car rides to remote locations for nature-filled family vacations. We had a blue VW bus, and we would load it up with our camping stuff, food and music and off we’d go. As a kid it felt like the journey opened up ahead of us organically. The Northern California coast was my mom and dad’s favorite place to take us. Mendocino, Bolinas and the tiny community of Sea Ranch. This little area about two hours north of San Francisco is a haven for retired ex-hippies and their families. The sparse cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean are adorned with wooden condominiums, single-family homes and dense clusters of Monterey Pines. In one of these clusters of wind-swept trees is a little chapel, just as windswept and rugged, and every time we drove through the area my mom insisted on stopping in.
This little building designed by California architect James Hubbell and completed in 1984, is a non-denominational chapel for the public to enjoy and visit. It curves and mimics the trees around it, a squat little building close to the ground; from the outside it looks like a redwood chocolate chip nestled in tall grasses. My family would pile out of the car, adventuring around outside and then my parents insisting that we step through the chapel door.
As a kid, I never really thought about it, it was just the building that my mom really enjoyed and we always stopped there. I like it because my mom liked it, and also because of the inside. The floors are cobbled with local stones, sea glass and hand-made ceramic tiles. Looking up, it is as though you are standing at the base of a giant kelp forest and the waves are above you. Natural light flows from a skylight in the roof and trickles down the sculptural and supportive metal kelp. A stained glass window throws blues and greens through the room and on the wooden and stone walls. “The materials used for this project are…a combination of stained glass, ceramics, metal and plasterwork”, all of which combine to achieve a feeling of a unified and peaceful building reminiscent of the surrounding environment and landscape1.
In their article, “Bioshelters, Ocean Arks and City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design,” Nancy Jack Todd and John Todd attempt to “establish both basic principles and specific technologies for ecological design”2. They write that “ the living world is the matrix of all design,” an endless resource, that when tapped can achieve a design compatible with the surrounding ecosystem3. Integration with the local environment is another important aspect of Todd and Todd’s manifesto. “Design must reflect bioregionality,” they write, and must acknowledge “culture and identity, geography, topography, climate and indigenous resource[s]”.
I can’t really tell if Hubbell tried to do this. The coast of Sea Ranch is lined with ancient underwater kelp forests, redwood trees border the town on the mountain side, and gulls, pelicans and hawks patrol from the sky. The Sea Ranch chapel clearly references all these elements, and Hubbell clearly found his inspiration in the location it would occupy. Stone floors like the stones clustered along the coast, immense redwood pillars, deep blues and luminous turquoise and greens, as well as the undersea flowers and plants which complete the effect. But it comes off as decorative, a project not completely integrated and in harmony with this unique Californian community; and the result leaves a feeling of a figurative interpretation nature. It’s symbolic and literal at the same time—showing off its natural materials while also simply mimicking them. It looks like the nature around it, but does it really integrate and uphold the manifestation of bioregionality? Is this not just a decorative framed building with electric lighting, doors and shingled roof? What is really seems like to me is a fun little building from the 1980s—I can see that era in every design decision. Like when a period piece set in the 1870s, but filmed in the 1970s still uses the makeup and hairstyles from the 1970s….like yes this is about the 19th century but it’s also about the seventies. It adds a depth and warmth and unchangeable fingerprint to it.
My nostalgia for those family trips definitely clouds my judgement about the Sea Ranch Chapel. Revisiting it in my mind as I write this, I can look back and see that much of the charm is pulled not so much from the natural environment, but that it effectively captures the zeitgeist of the people living there and the era it was built. An era when nature, environmentalism and anything hippie or outdoors was not only a novelty, even subculture, but had a sort of cheesyness, goofiness or whimsicalness to it. What was the purpose of that cheeseification? Is it because interpreting or mimicking the natural world is so daunting that tackling it head on is almost impossible, so cartooning it up allows for the fundamental misunderstandings to rise to the surface? How does one even begin to construct something that blends perfectly with an ancient cliffside without either re-creating the cliff-side? Or it is because even in that love and worship of nature, there needs to be the feeling that humans are conquering it, that humanity is in control.
Which is sort of where my view of Hubbell’s chapel now lies. It’s quirky, vintage fun and weird but so silly that someone built a chapel for worship next to the Vatican that is the Pacific Ocean. What rubes contemporary humans are to think they can create something better than what already exists. But to see it as a human endeavor or expression, an attempt at a dialogue is lovely. And to remember my childhood there, even more so.
Sally Woodbridge, “Organic Architecture,” 1995 (in Architectural Design Magazine 106).
Nancy Jack Todd and John Todd, “Bioshelters, Ocean Arks and City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design,” 1984 (in Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture, 1997, pp. 141-43).
Ibid.