The best modern architecture in 1960s Scottsdale was mostly built by churches, not developers. Congregations had growing memberships, money from building drives, and a reason to want something new. Engineers had just learned to roof big rooms with a few inches of curved concrete. Put those together and you got Scottsdale’s run of thin-shell sanctuaries, most of them still in use and nearly all of them overlooked.
The city’s own research is the backbone of this note. In 2010 the Historic Preservation Office surveyed 28 surviving houses of worship built between 1945 and 1973 and folded the results into a context report, “Scottsdale Places of Worship 1945–1973,” by John Southard and Don Meserve. On June 18, 2013, the City Council put three of them on the Scottsdale Historic Register on the same night. The rest of the 28 are on survey forms the Historic Preservation Office holds. Ask for them.
Before the leap
When Scottsdale incorporated in 1951 it had six churches, all built before the war. The new congregations hadn’t yet raised enough money to build. The only intact prewar religious building left today is the 1933 Old Adobe Mission on Brown Avenue.
The first postwar churches played it safe. The city’s study names the 1956 Our Lady of Perpetual Help campus, the 1956 Scottsdale Methodist Church, the 1958 Scottsdale Presbyterian Church and First Baptist. They used Spanish-themed materials or desert masonry, but in form they were still recognizably traditional churches.
Then, in the early 1960s, the money and the engineering arrived together. The city’s reports point to Félix Candela, a Spanish architect who worked in Mexico. In the 1950s he proved that thin, curved concrete shells could be cheap and stable. Scottsdale’s architects took the hint.
The three on the register
Holy Cross Lutheran (1961)
3110 N. Hayden Road · Ordinance 4091
Walt Lockley of Modern Phoenix calls this “among the best modern buildings in Phoenix,” and he’s right. The architect was William D. Knight Jr., who practiced in the Valley for only a few years, from about 1959 to 1963, and later served as the architect for the Navajo Nation.
What to look at:
- The roof. Seven thin-shell sections on each side of a straight ridge. Each one is made of warped concrete planes that dip down to a freestanding column on the north side, and the drains run inside the columns.
- The north wall. A covered walk runs between those seven columns and a floor-to-roof wall of glass.
- The cross tower. It stands apart from the church on two curved ribbons of concrete. At the base they are at right angles to each other; each twists more than 45 degrees as it rises until the two are just past parallel. A steel bar holds them apart near the top.
- The rest of the campus. The 1964 Sunday school wings and an eight-sided chapel have folded-plate concrete roofs. Church staff told the city that a different, unnamed architect designed the school wings.
Knight and his wife, Elfleda, carved and gold-leafed the altar stone together. Their daughter told Modern Phoenix about it.
First Church of Christ, Scientist (1962)
6427 E. Indian School Road · Ordinance 4089
T.S. Montgomery, who also designed Craftsman Court, built this one out of materials that age well: burnt adobe brick, copper with raised seams for the scalloped fascia and the spire, and a brise-soleil of stacked precast blocks. Those are 16 by 24 inches on the Indian School Road side and 12 by 18 inches along the west. The roof is precast panels cantilevered from interior columns, so the screen walls carry no load. The classroom wing behind it is a half-circle with beams that radiate like sun rays, but you can’t see it from the street.
The church won a Valley Beautiful Citizens Committee award in 1969. AIA Phoenix put it on its “Phoenix 25” list in 2009, and Doug Sydnor featured it in Scottsdale Architecture (2010). The city’s report calls it the best Southwest Modern example among the four churches it evaluated in that round. Three were listed; the report doesn’t name the fourth.
Montgomery designed four churches in the area in the 1960s, each for a different denomination. Of the other three, two are outside Scottsdale: St. Barnabas on the Desert (1961) in Paradise Valley and Prince of Peace Lutheran (1966) in Phoenix. The third, Scottsdale United Methodist, is covered below.
Glass & Garden Community Church (1966)
8620 E. McDonald Drive · Ordinance 4090
This is Scottsdale’s drive-in church, and as far as the city knows it was the only one in Scottsdale “and possibly in Arizona.” Worshipers could sit in their cars in the east lot and listen on post-mounted speakers, watching the service through a full-height glass wall. Later the service went out over a radio station instead. Above the sanctuary is a shallow thin-shell dome, 136 feet across and six inches thick, poured in one day.
The idea wasn’t unique to Scottsdale. The founding pastor, Floyd W. Goulooze, went to the same seminary as Robert H. Schuller, whose Garden Grove, California, congregation started in a drive-in theater in 1955 and later built the Crystal Cathedral. Time counted more than 70 walk-in, drive-in churches in America in 1967. The full story, including the architect (E. Logan Campbell) and the pastor’s railing, is on our Glass & Garden Community Church page.
The one that should be listed
St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church
6261 N. Granite Reef Road
People call it the “praying mantis church.” It is the most sculptural building in the city: groined concrete vaults about four inches thick, rising to a dome. The city’s driving tour describes it as two intersecting saddles. Wendell Rossman’s firm designed it with engineer John Parsons, the same team behind the demolished Los Arcos Methodist (below).
The sources don’t agree on the date:
- The city’s tour says 1967.
- SPS+, the successor firm, says Rossman designed it in 1961.
- Modern Phoenix’s account points later.
It isn’t on the register. The details, including the mosaic Stations of the Cross and the etched-glass crucifixion, are on our St. Maria Goretti page.
The same firm, credited as Cartmell & Rossman, designed the 1962 Valley National Bank branch on McDowell. It holds up a concrete canopy on diagonal struts and is the closest secular relative of these churches.
The thin files
Scottsdale United Methodist, 4140 N. Miller Road. T.S. Montgomery designed a 1964 sanctuary here. The city’s report calls it a “sanctuary addition,” which implies the congregation already had buildings on the site. Sydnor’s book features it. Beyond that, the public record we could find is almost empty. Is this the same congregation as the 1956 Scottsdale Methodist Church the study names? The survey form at the Historic Preservation Office should say.
The Community Design Studio, 7506 E. Indian School Road. This was built in 1952 as Ascension Lutheran Church. In 1998 the city turned it into its redevelopment and urban design studio and commissioned murals for it. Kristine Kollasch, Max Hammond and Paige Tuhey painted the interior. Sam Mindrum Logan painted the patio mural, “A Celebration of Diversity: The Lines That Connect.” The building also has Scottsdale’s best-documented ghost story; see Haunted Scottsdale.
Gone
Los Arcos Methodist Church, 7425 E. Culver Street. It was built in autumn 1966: a white, twelve-sided thin-shell building with arches all the way around, just east of the Los Arcos Mall. Its motto was “Church in the Marketplace.” Modern Phoenix traces the form to Candela and reads the buttresses as a sign that the engineering was less “pure” than his. It was demolished in 2012 for housing. More losses are in lost midcentury Scottsdale.
The end of the run
The study found that, apart from one exception, no new house of worship went up on a new site in Scottsdale between 1973 and 1978. The recession of 1973–75 stopped construction. The exception was a 1975 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints building on 82nd Street near Saguaro High School. By then, as the city’s study notes, thin-shell concrete was falling out of favor across the country.
Visiting working churches
Most of the buildings in this note are still working churches.
- Look from the street or the parking lot, on a weekday, outside service times.
- Don’t try doors, and don’t photograph people arriving for worship.
- Call the church office if you want to see inside. Most congregations are proud of their buildings and will tell you when it’s convenient.
- At First Church of Christ, Scientist, the city’s tour notes that the driveway gate is often closed but there’s room to stop a car between the street and the gate.
- On Sunday mornings, stay away entirely. These buildings were made for congregations, not for us.
Done on a weekday, Holy Cross, First Church, Glass & Garden, St. Maria Goretti and the bank on McDowell make a good drive. Go in late afternoon, when the low sun brings out the curves in the concrete.