Relocation of the Wayfarers Chapel on the Pacific coast shows the vulnerability of cultural sites in an increasingly volatile climate

For 73 years it reigned, unique and serene, on a high plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean: the Wayfarers Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr’s midcentury reinvention of what a church could be.

The photogenic, see-through sanctuary framed in a canopy of redwoods was beloved long before it became Instagram-famous. Jayne Mansfield was married there, Brian Wilson too. Last Christmas Eve, two weeks after the chapel had been designated a National Historic Landmark, it took three services to accommodate everyone who showed up to spend the holiday with chapel regulars. No one knew it would be the last one.

This month, Wayfarers Chapel is being dismantled, an emergency attempt to save the structure’s irreplaceable redwood, steel and stone components in the wake of a devastating landslide. By taking it apart now, before it’s too twisted and broken to ever reconfigure, the chapel’s leaders hope to give it a second life someday on stable ground. They don’t have the cash yet for a rebuild, but they’re doing what they can at this critical moment: spending nearly half a million dollars on triage.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/31/wayfarers-chapel-landslides-los-angeles