What is St. Maria Goretti Church?
Walt Lockley opened his Modern Phoenix essay on this building with: “It would be fun to try to describe this over the phone.” He was right.
St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church, at 6261 N. Granite Reef Road, is a sanctuary made of thin concrete shells. Curved vaults about four inches thick spring from the ground, arch up and meet at a crown that lets light in from above. The City of Scottsdale’s mid-century tour describes “two intersecting saddles with a dome on top,” about 60 feet tall, and places it in the line of Félix Candela, the Spanish-born architect who built shell churches all over Mexico in the 1950s. Some locals call it the “praying mantis church.” Once you’ve seen the struts you’ll understand why.
The architect was Wendell E. Rossman, of Rossman & Cartmell, the firm that became SPS+ Architects. The engineer was John Parsons, who also built the 136-foot dome of the Glass & Garden drive-in church a few minutes away. It is a working Catholic parish. It is also one of two thin-shell churches still standing in Scottsdale, and it is not on the city’s Historic Register.
Nobody agrees on its date. SPS+ says Rossman designed it in 1961. The city’s tour says 1967. Modern Phoenix sets the scene in 1972. We give all three below and explain what would settle it.
How to see it
Outside, from the street. The Granite Reef Road sidewalk gives you the full profile. Late afternoon is best, because low light from the west picks out the double curves of the shells and the ridges where they meet. The city’s tour points out that, unlike the Glass & Garden church, this building “lets the shape of the building speak for itself without much ornamentation.” There isn’t much detail to hunt for. The shape is the whole show. Walk far enough to see it from two sides, and you’ll notice that the plan is close to symmetrical. Modern Phoenix explains why: the original plan was a cruciform church, with an expansion to the west that was never built.
Inside, at Mass. Visitors are welcome at services, and that’s the respectful way in. What to look for:
- The free span. The arching struts carry everything, so nothing interrupts the floor.
- The light from above. SPS+ notes that daylight enters at the top, where the shapes meet, and passes through mosaics that filter it. Modern Phoenix calls the stained glass at the top of the dome the building’s “considerable grace and mystery.”
- The abstract mosaic Stations of the Cross, the balcony, and an etched-glass crucifixion image after Salvador Dalí that appears to hang in midair.
- The pipe organ, which Modern Phoenix calls one of the most powerful in the area and says was refurbished not long before it wrote.
Keep cameras away during the liturgy. To photograph the interior at any other time, call the parish office first.
Do the pair. The Glass & Garden Community Church on McDonald Drive is next on the city’s tour and had the same engineer. The two buildings answer the same question differently: Glass & Garden is a decorated cylinder under a shallow dome, while Goretti is pure structure. See both in one late-afternoon loop, then read our midcentury churches note for the ones Scottsdale lost.
Foam, shotcrete and a pencil
Walt Lockley’s account in Modern Phoenix is the most detailed description of how the building went up. He says it is foam on a wooden frame, with shotcrete sprayed on the outside and a half-inch layer of plaster troweled carefully on the inside. “Those graceful arching struts have structural purpose. They allow the free-span space inside.” He also passes on a story he labels as legend: designer Don Gadberry did all the stress calculations with a pencil. SPS+ describes the geometry in engineer’s terms: groined vaults 4 inches thick with a 41-foot rise and 56 feet between spring lines.
The city’s places-of-worship research explains why Scottsdale churches built like this in the 1960s. Shell concrete used little steel and spanned big rooms without columns. After the Second Vatican Council, the city’s report observes, Catholic congregations read the reforms as permission to build modern. The method had a short life, though. The same report lists the reasons shells disappeared after the early 1970s: labor costs, maintenance and waterproofing headaches, a shrinking pool of engineers who could calculate them, and arguments with building officials. Modern Phoenix makes the same point: in 1972 there was still “some slim chance that we might leave square buildings behind.” That didn’t happen.
Rossman’s office kept at it. By February 1975, Modern Phoenix reports, the firm had completed fifteen concrete-shell buildings. The same team designed the Valley National Bank branch Modern Phoenix places “at Los Arcos” (probably the 1962 branch at 7345 E. McDowell, though that isn’t confirmed) and an ASU law school building Lockley calls the most peculiar on campus. With Parsons, they also built Los Arcos Methodist Church on Culver Street: twelve sides, thin-shell, finished in autumn 1966, demolished in 2012.
The date problem
Three sources give three dates:
- 1961. SPS+ Architects, which presents itself as the continuation of Rossman’s firm and lists the church in its “legacy portfolio,” says it was “designed in 1961 by Dr. Wendell Rossman.”
- 1967. The City of Scottsdale’s “Drive Yourself Mod” mid-century tour lists “St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church, 6261 N. Granite Reef, Rossman Associates, architect, John Parsons, engineer (1967).”
- 1972. Lockley’s Modern Phoenix essay says “The year was 1972” before describing the building. He may have meant the date of construction or only the moment in architecture, but it reads as a date.
The first two can both be true. A design drawn in 1961 and a church dedicated in 1967 is an ordinary gap for a young parish raising money. The 1972 date is the outlier. Three records would settle it: the Diocese of Phoenix archives (parish founding and dedication), the City of Scottsdale’s building-permit records for 6261 N. Granite Reef Road (searchable by address in the city’s eServices document viewer), and the dedication story in the Scottsdale Progress, on microfilm in the Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library. Until someone pulls them, any website giving a single year with confidence, including this one, is guessing.
The height has the same problem on a smaller scale. The city says about 60 feet, Modern Phoenix says a 60-foot dome, and some secondary accounts say 70. SPS+‘s 41-foot vault rise measures something different, the arches rather than the crown.
Why it isn’t on the register
In 2013 the city listed three postwar churches on the Historic Register: Glass & Garden, Holy Cross Lutheran and First Church of Christ, Scientist. St. Maria Goretti wasn’t one of them, and the public record we found doesn’t say whether a listing was ever proposed to the parish or diocese. The building is on the city’s own driving tour, so the preservation office plainly considers it significant. A register listing would require the Historic Preservation Commission to review exterior changes. Without one, the building’s protection is the parish’s own care, which so far has been good.
Why it matters
Scottsdale likes to call its architecture Southwestern, meaning adobe, Taliesin and Bennie Gonzales. St. Maria Goretti is a reminder that for about a decade the city was also part of a bolder international experiment. A local firm, a local engineer and a parish built a shell church that wouldn’t look out of place beside Candela’s work in Mexico City. Los Arcos Methodist is gone, so this and the Glass & Garden church are what’s left. If the date dispute ever gets settled, the person who settles it will probably be the first to have opened the parish’s own files.