The church is an ugly, non-functional building only three decades old. The religious group that worships there wants to demolish it and replace it with a structure that actually serves the needs of the congregation. The city wants to stop them, declaring the non-functional eyesore to be "historic" -- because it is a non-functional eyesore.

Two blocks from the White House, there is a concrete fortress that looks like a top-secret government installation. Set back on a barren plaza frequented mainly by homeless men in search of a restroom, the building faces 16th Street NW with dirty, rough, blank walls. Amazingly, this building is a church -- probably the city's most unfriendly and depressing piece of spiritual architecture.

The District government proposes to declare this atrocity a historic landmark.

Never mind that the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, is only 36 years old, and its members never liked the design. Never mind that when it was built, then-Washington Post architecture critic Wolf von Eckardt called it "rude and disorderly," a brutal, uncivilized and inappropriate intrusion on the approach to the White House. Never mind that the Dupont Circle neighborhood commission recently voted unanimously to oppose historic status for the church. Never mind that Christian Science is a declining denomination that has cut its staff and budget by nearly half and is selling off some of its most valuable properties. Never mind that this downtown congregation's few dozen members want to raze the concrete pillbox and replace its 400-seat sanctuary with a new, more intimate home.

"It is always with reluctance, and fairly rarely, that we recommend a designation over an owner's objection," says a staff report from the city's Historic Preservation Office to be presented today to the preservation review board. But that's exactly what the city now proposes to do, freezing plans by a developer to create a mixed-use building that could include a small church for the Christian Scientists.

It seems that the building is an example of a style known as Brutalism. It is a virtual model of the style. Therefore, the city wants to keep it around, over the objections of pretty near everybody. Property rights be damned -- government knows best!

If you ever want to know why such historical designations should be opposed and the restrictions that go with them be invalidated, this is the poster case. Read the rest of the article to see how the whims of a few are used to engage in an uncompensated taking of property by government.

Posted by: Greg at 10:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 433 words, total size 3 kb.