Q: The recent film The Brutalist has me wondering about that stark, rectangular church on E. Huron at Fletcher. What’s the story behind it?
A: Similar to the church constructed in the fictional movie, this work of monumental concrete was created by a European refugee.
Gunnar Birkerts was born in Latvia, fleeing ahead of the advancing Soviet army at the end of WWII. In 1945, he began his studies at the Stuttgart Institute of Technology, where he was one of the youngest students; he emigrated to the U.S. in 1949 to work with Scandinavian architect Eero Saarinen in Birmingham, Michigan. Ten years later, he joined the U-M faculty, and designed the University Reformed Church a few years later.
“It won an award for its unusual design—a concrete slab building, with windowless interior walls [and] indirect natural light,” reader Louisa Griffes wrote in response to Sally Bjork’s May 2021 Observer I Spy contest. It “was named Holy Toaster because of its slab-sided design,” added Terri Klein Gordinier.
But by then, the congregation that commissioned it had moved on: “The skylights leaked from day one,” then-pastor Sung Kim told the Observer’s James Leonard in a 2008 Inside Ann Arbor article. “The sanctuary is four stories high and made of concrete, so in the winter when you turn on the heat, it was never more than sixty degrees in there.”
Sung led the congregation’s move to rented space on campus and a name change to Grace Ann Arbor, which now has three locations around the city. And Harvest Mission has found a way to work with the building—including what an architectural blog called “the unforgivable sin of covering up Birkert’s divine skylights.” We weren’t able to reach them, but a website photo shows a good-sized congregation.
Birkerts lived to age ninety-two. Near the end of a prolific career he completed projects in once-again independent Latvia, including the National Library of Latvia.
While the film showed its architect turning out brutalist designs only, Birkerts was adept in other styles. He designed the Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired Domino Farms building and the modernist underground addition to the U-M Law Library.
The Brutalist style has always stirred strong emotions, and as buildings age, owners will face decisions about whether to maintain or demolish them. The university is also crowding in on this one, recently demolishing several houses to build its new College of Pharmacy right next door. But for now, the stark simplicity of the building seems suited to Harvest Mission’s goal: to be a “first-century church in the twenty-first century.”
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