What was Los Arcos Methodist Church?
In the 1960s a few Scottsdale congregations built churches that looked like nothing else in town. Two survive. This was the third, and it’s gone.
Los Arcos Methodist Church was finished in the autumn of 1966 at 7425 E. Culver Street, near North 74th Street, just south of McDowell Road. It was a white, twelve-sided building. The city’s places-of-worship context describes it as a “12-sided thin-shell concrete paraboloid creation.” Roadside Architecture describes “a clamshell roof with 12 arches.” It was round in plan, and the arches ran all the way around it. The architects were Cartmell & Rossman and the structural engineer was John K. Parsons, the same team that built St. Maria Goretti on Granite Reef Road.
Its motto was “Church in the Marketplace.” The marketplace was Los Arcos Mall, just to the west at Scottsdale and McDowell. Modern Phoenix’s Walt Lockley saw the church’s location as part of a familiar Valley pattern, with new commercial and housing growth springing up around each new mall.
The mall closed in 1999 and is now ASU’s SkySong. The church was demolished in 2012 for a housing development. The city’s 1945–1973 places-of-worship context calls it “a stunning example of the new style of architecture embraced by Scottsdale congregations of the era.” Two of the city’s own register reports, written for other churches, mention its demolition and call it unfortunate.
How to see what’s left of it
Not on Culver Street. The building is gone and the site is private housing. There’s no marker. You can see the address from the street, but there’s nothing to look at, and the neighbors live there now.
See its relatives instead. Scottsdale’s 1960s thin-shell churches came out of a small group of designers, and two of their buildings still stand:
- St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church, 6261 N. Granite Reef Road. Same architect’s office, same engineer. The city’s driving tour pairs the two buildings, and Goretti is the closest thing to Los Arcos you can still walk into. It’s an active parish, so go at Mass times or ask the parish office.
- The Glass & Garden Community Church, 8620 E. McDonald Drive. A different architect, E. Logan Campbell, but Parsons engineered its 136-foot shallow dome. The city listed it on the register in 2013.
- The Valley National Bank on McDowell, 7345 E. McDowell Road. A 1962 Cartmell & Rossman bank, now a Chase branch, a few blocks from the church site. It’s the firm’s surviving neighbor of Los Arcos.
Read the bigger story. Our midcentury churches field guide puts Los Arcos alongside Holy Cross Lutheran, First Church of Christ, Scientist and the rest. Lost midcentury Scottsdale lists it with the other modern buildings the city tore down.
If you have photographs, the Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library and the Scottsdale Historical Society both collect them. Good interior photographs of this building are scarce.
A church built next to a mall
The motto tells you what the congregation had in mind. Modern Phoenix’s Walt Lockley wrote that the church’s location and its motto, “Church in the Marketplace,” “are connected to the nearby Los Arcos Mall,” and called that “a regular pattern in the growth of Phoenix, new commercial and housing growth sprouting up around the newest malls.” This site’s Los Arcos Mall page dates the mall’s opening to 1969, three years after the church. If that’s right, the Methodists built next to a mall that was still under construction and placed their church where they expected the traffic to be.
Roadside Architecture dates the work from 1963 to 1966, and Lockley dates the finished building to autumn 1966. The city’s sources simply say 1966.
The shell
The city’s architectural styles guide for places of worship files the church under “Expressionist”: buildings with “curving thin shelled reinforced concrete walls or hyperbolic paraboloid roofs,” where “the structure and material are both very apparent on the exterior.” It lists three local examples: Los Arcos, St. Maria Goretti and Holy Cross Lutheran.
The sources describe the form in slightly different words. The city says twelve-sided paraboloid. Roadside Architecture says clamshell roof on twelve arches. Lockley says round in plan, with “twelve arches” that “required expensive custom construction.” All three describe the same building: a low, white concrete shell carried on a ring of twelve arches. Lockley called the exterior shape “low, gentle.” Lockley noticed something else: the building had buttresses, which he read as “a clue that the engineering here was less ‘pure’ than in other buildings, either by design or in mid-course correction or in retro-fix.” Whether the buttresses were in the original drawings or added later is a question only the drawings or the building permits can answer.
The design team is well documented. The city’s styles guide and Roadside Architecture both credit Cartmell & Rossman. The city’s driving tour says “the same architect and engineering firms” were responsible for both Los Arcos and St. Maria Goretti. The city’s register report on the Glass & Garden church names the engineer: John K. Parsons, “responsible for other thin shell concrete church buildings in Scottsdale including Los Arcos Methodist Church (demolished) and Saint Maria Goretti,” and also the engineer of the Skydome at Northern Arizona University.
Félix Candela sometimes gets credit for the building. He shouldn’t. Lockley grouped Los Arcos with the 1962 Priory Chapel outside St. Louis and the La Concha Motel in Las Vegas as buildings “derivative of the work of the great Mexican architect-engineer Felix Candela, a true innovator in thin-shell paraboloid concrete structures.” That describes an influence. The city’s driving tour makes the same connection for this group of churches. Candela didn’t design Los Arcos.
Inside
Lockley wasn’t impressed by the interior. “If the outside is mid-sixties futuristic,” he wrote, “it does nothing to prepare you for the inside.” Where you might expect a bright room lit through the ring of arches, he found “a dark cave-like interior, like a theme restaurant, or a sophisticated mud hut.” Irregular textured panels with built-in lights hung from “a ribbed, biomorphic, nubby ceiling with a couple of big rounded HVAC bulges.” He also noted that the round plan “might have been used to suggest equality and participation,” but the seating ignored it. He was careful to add that this wasn’t a criticism of how the congregation had adapted to the building.
Decline, and the conflicting accounts
The record of the church’s last years is thin, and the sources don’t agree.
- The name. The city’s places-of-worship styles guide lists it as “Los Arcos Methodist Church (renamed Valley Plaza Methodist Church).” It doesn’t say when.
- Vacant or active? Roadside Architecture says “the church became vacant in 1999,” the year the mall closed. Lockley, writing on Modern Phoenix some years later, describes “a small but devoted congregation” for which the church was “an important anchor in the neighborhood,” and expects it to benefit from SkySong. The July 2012 demolition post says “the congregation however is still alive and well” and “Los Arcos may not have had great attendance.” Those accounts can’t all be right. Our best reading is that the 1999 vacancy date belongs to the mall and has been attached to the church by mistake. The church’s own records would confirm it.
- The demolition. The city’s places-of-worship context says the church “closed and was demolished in 2012 for a housing redevelopment project.” On July 9, 2012, the Cambridge Properties blog posted photographs of the building partly demolished, with its windows out and its sign still standing. Roadside Architecture says the demolition came “just a few months after” its own photographs from earlier that year.
None of the sources we’ve seen says who sold the property, whether anyone tried to save the building, or where the congregation went. The timing is what hurts. The city put its first three postwar churches on the Historic Register on June 18, 2013: Glass & Garden, Holy Cross Lutheran and First Church of Christ, Scientist. Two of those zoning cases carry 2012 case numbers. Scottsdale was preparing to protect its 1960s churches in the same year it lost the most adventurous one.
Where the answers are
- The congregation. The Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church keeps records of its churches, including name changes, mergers and closures. That’s the place to look for when it became Valley Plaza, why it closed and where its members went.
- The building. The City of Scottsdale’s building permits for 7425 E. Culver Street, searchable by address, would show the original permit, any later structural work on the buttresses, and the 2012 demolition permit.
- The photographs. The Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library and the Scottsdale Historical Society. The 1966 dedication coverage in the Scottsdale Progress would include the architect’s own description of the building.