Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan designed the Kehilath Anshe Ma’arav Synagogue in 1890 as a worship and community center for the German-Jewish community in Douglas. As the Black community grew with the first wave of the Great Migration in the 1910s, KAM sold the Synagogue to the Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1922. The Church’s Music Director, Thomas A. Dorsey, was a visionary composer and performer who blended spiritual and blues traditions into the style first called Gospel Blues and, by the 1930s, simply Gospel. Pilgrim Baptist was a landmark in the Gospel world for seven decades, its 3000 seats filling for artists from Chicago, particularly Mahalia Jackson. Aretha Franklin, James Cleveland, and the Staples Singers performed regularly, and Martin Luther King, Jr. preached there during the Civil Rights movement.
The Church burned in a 2006 fire while undergoing repairs to its roof. The entire Sullivan-designed interior was destroyed, leaving only the perimeter walls standing. Thanks to a preservation plan by WJE and Central Building and Preservation, those walls were stabilized and maintained. Meanwhile, community and church members formed the National Museum of Gospel Music and have been working to transform the site into an exhibition and performance center that would both acknowledge the structure’s deep history while introducing new generations to Gospel’s traditions and its contemporary styles.
Last summer, we organized a visit to the site for the Construction History Society of America’s annual meeting. Out of that visit and with the help of Rachel Will from WJE and Mark Kuberski from Central Buiding and Preservation, I met with Antoinette Wright, President and Executive Director of the Museum, and Cynthia Jones, Chair of the Church’s Board of Trustees, about basing our Fall Integrated Design Studio on the project. They were enthusiastic about having students generate ideas from their program, and Christopher Lee, from the Chicago design firm Johnson & Lee, generously shared the space plan they had developed.
That proved to be a challenging but inspiring brief. Students tackled the problems of wedging a 450-seat auditorium, along with exhibition spaces, offices, public facilities, and extensive back-of-house requirements into the confined footprint of the original Church—while paying homage to the relics of the Sullivan walls. Gospel, we learned from UIUC music postdoc Alonza Lawrence, has both a deep tradition and an energetic range of current practitioners. How to build for a genre that incorporates influences from classical to hip-hop layered additional questions onto the spatial and civic charges the site and program already offered.
We took an admittedly liberal view of preservation standards, trying to see the Sullivan elements more as catalysts than museum pieces. But each project found inspiration from the existing compositions—either in massing, detail, materiality, or proportion. Some were inspired by seeing the raw, scarred interiors of the walls, composed of seven layers of structural brick and bearing the marks of the collapsed iron structure within. Those surfaces seemed to tell a more complete history of the original structure and the fire. Others saw opportunities to look forward, with glass skins, metal screens, or timber vaults that extended new interior volumes above or next to the originals, again trying to find a dialogue between the structure’s past, present, and future lives.
Last week, students had the opportunity to present their work in Chicago to Museum and Church board members, as well as a large group of neighborhood residents, city officials, and local church figures. The discussion was lively, and the projects generated a deep discussion about the contexts in which the walls find themselves. While some want a modern museum that reflects the ongoing relevance and vitality of Gospel in its contemporary forms, others hope for a more faithful restoration of the original Church’s massing and interiors. We hope that discussion will continue, at all levels.
Many thanks to Cynthia Jones and Antoinette Wright of Pilgrim Baptist and the National Museum of Gospel Music; Rachel Will of WJE and Mark Kuberski of Central Building and Preservation; Christopher Lee from Johnson and Lee; Dr. Alonza Lawrence of the UIUC School of Music, who sat on reviews all semester after talking to us about the history and future of Gospel; and the Illinois School of Architecture, which arranged student travel. An exceptionally enjoyable semester.
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