outside
Nature’s
Graces
With the lightness and
imagination of origami and
the mathematical exactitude
of digital design, this open-air
chapel invites all creatures
into its folds.
Story by Sarah Rich
122 November 2008
When asked about religion, Frank
Lloyd Wright once said, “I believe
in God, but I spell it N-A-T-U-R-E.”
Of course, he was in good company
among generations of believers in
the divinity of wilderness, whatever
their faiths. That common connec-
tion was top of mind when architect
Murray Legge set out to design a
nondenominational interfaith chapel
on a Cub Scout campground out-
side Austin, Texas. Working with his
students at the University of Texas at
Austin, Legge created a structure that
speaks directly to Wright’s spiritual
point of view.
Tucked into a forest clearing on
the edge of a wide, lazy river, the cha-
pel is really no more than a geometric
latticework gently enclosing a portion
of the open space. According to Legge,
a design and project architect with
the firm LZT Architects, the structure
took inspiration from one of Wright’s
brightest pupils, Fay Jones, whose
Thorncrown Chapel in Arkansas—–
a graceful inversion of European
Gothic cathedrals—–turned the tradi-
tional house of worship inside out.
When you stand in the chapel, the
rough-hewn cedar structure feels
natural enough to have grown there
among the trees, but Legge empha-
sizes that despite its organic appear-
ance, the building owes its existence
to the technological precision of
computer-aided drafting. “I like to
think of it as Calatrava meets Daniel
Boone,” he says. During a classroom
Photos by Sarah Rich
exercise in Google SketchUp, Legge
formulated a set of rules that yielded
a mathematically exact structure,
then programmed the identically
measured components to rotate
Though it looks as if it could be folded up
and carried off like a lawn chair, the jointed
cedar stands firmly in place thanks to ten-
sion and two strong cables.
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OUTSIDE
The soft exterior of the rough-hewn cedar
(top) peels away from the planks in places,
hanging free like Spanish moss.
124 November 2008
incrementally, creating the curvature
of the chapel’s eight sides. The digital
file was like “a set of instructions for
putting puzzle pieces together,” says
Legge. All they needed to do was cut
the pieces and find a puzzlemaster.
Choosing cedar for the building
material made sense purely on aes-
thetic grounds, given the added bonus
of its rich color and intense fragrance,
but the decision was largely based on
convenience and the responsible use
of local resources. “Cedar is a weed
here,” Legge explains, adding that the
regional terrain was mostly grasslands
before the invasive species took over.
A sawmill just down the road from the
Cub Scout camp, which was originally
a cedar-chip mill, turned out to be
a perfect source for dimensional
lumber. Legge opted to use standard
cut pieces, most of them thick and
rusticated, with finer-sawn pieces for
the upper reaches.
To hold the 184 wooden planks
together, 138 steel plates were CNC-
cut by a local fabricator using Legge’s
Visitors to the chapel have compared it
to a Japanese warrior helmet and the early
construction phases of a wooden ship.
Legge (bottom) says he finds new ways
CAD file to meet exact specifications.
A contractor was hired to assemble
the structure, assuming that in spite
of the many pieces, their limited varia-
tion would make the process fairly
simple. But slight irregularities in the
wood and the subtle changes in the
angle of each joint made the task more
challenging than it originally seemed.
The building process took two
months. Legge made the one-hour
drive from Austin every weekend
to check on its progress, sometimes
finding that segments had been bolted
inaccurately then mended as well as
possible without sacrificing the custom
joints. “I would come out here and
see some pieces put together wrongly
and the contractor would joke with
me, saying, ‘Oh, it just needs a little
tweak,’” Legge recounts, nodding in
the direction of a pile of tools under a
tree. “You see that sledgehammer over
there? We call that the ‘The Tweaker.’”
The finished product, however,
reveals little in the way of production
hiccups. The 23 jointed frames are
held together on each side by nothing
but a horizontal cable. Though the
structure is stable, it appears almost
skeletally delicate, the upper slats shift-
ing like the tops of the trees when a
breeze sweeps through. “That freedom
of movement goes against everything
in architecture,” Legge says with a hint
of excitement.
In the context of a Cub Scout camp,
Legge views the bare-bones design
as an educational opportunity. “You
can really see how it’s built. Kids here
can get inspired about architecture.”
The orientation of the structure also
provides an education on seasonal
rhythms and light, framing the sunset
directly on the summer solstice, and
filtering its light at increasingly long
angles through the year.
Unoccupied or in service, the chapel
possesses an uncommon peaceful-
ness. The west-facing pews invite quiet
contemplation and provide a listening
post for erratic symphonies of birds.
No matter what events take place
here in the years to come, the small
cedar chapel will create a frame,
not so much to contain what’s inside
it, but to magnify what surrounds it.
of looking at the structure each time he
visits it. “When the sun goes down in
summer,” he says, “the light through the
wood sets the whole thing on fire.”
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