Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.’s Famed Wayfarers Chapel Is in Danger

For more than 70 years, Wayfarers Chapel—a celebrated example of organic modernism designed by Lloyd Wright, son of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright—has sat on a picturesque bluff high above the Pacific Ocean in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. With its mostly glass exterior showcasing the towering redwoods outside, the chapel has attracted hundreds of thousands of annual visitors, some of whom come to attend one of the 400 or so weddings held there each year.

In mid-February, however, the chapel closed to visitors and canceled all upcoming weddings, saying the recently designated National Historic Landmark had become unstable thanks to the 260-acre Portuguese Bend landslide, which has been slow-moving for years but really started to pick up momentum in 2023 thanks to heavy rain in the area. The landslide had both threatened and destroyed local homes and businesses in prior years, but by early 2024 it started looking like its unprecedented rate of movement could take out the chapel if something wasn’t done soon to save it. At the time, the chapel’s directors created a $250,000 GoFundMe seeking to raise funds for geological study and slide remediation, but even then, that amount was only a drop in the bucket compared to what they’d ultimately need.

On May 13, representatives for Wayfarers Chapel announced that their priority was now to disassemble and relocate the landmark structure amid the accelerated land movement to preserve as much of the building as possible. Katie Horak, a principal at Architectural Resources Group, the local firm behind the preservation effort (with input from the National Park Service), said in a press conference that the "only way to preserve this building is to move it to a temporary safe location."

Now, after an extremely careful dismantling process, which required that the building be taken apart piece by piece due to the nature of its construction, the components of the Lloyd Wright–designed sanctuary have been stored away indefinitely. Where the celebrated example of organic ecclesiastical architecture will be relocated still remains to be seen.

"Classic California"

First opened in 1951, the 100-seat chapel was commissioned by the Swedenborgian Church of North America, though a significant amount of the site’s money and attention has historically come from outside its congregation. Actors Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay were married in the chapel in 1958, as were Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson and his beloved Melinda Ledbetter in 1995. It’s been featured in shows like The O.C., Lucifer, Revenge, and even The Bachelorette (all for wedding scenes), and True Detective (as the site of a fictitious hippie commune), and has captured the hearts of modernism fanatics for years. "There’s really no place like Wayfarers Chapel," says Adrian Fine, president of the Los Angeles Conservancy. "It’s classic California in terms of the experience, because you’re looking up through the trees and there are no other places that evoke that special feeling, which is why this is especially distressing."

Alan Hess, an architect and historian who calls Lloyd Wright "the most important unheralded architect in Southern California modernism," says that the chapel is an absolute masterpiece, appealing to professional architects and the general public in equal measure. Lloyd Wright trained as a landscape architect while he was working with Irving J. Gill, another Southern California architectural icon. Wright became a regular architect when he decided to go out on his own, but Wayfarers Chapel is a good example of how he frequently managed to blend the indoors and out, capturing not just the beauty of the building’s interior, but also of the way the trees move or of how the sun’s rays come through the glass at different times of the day. "Buildings that embrace the beauties of nature are always going to be popular with the general public," says Hess, "and the way Wright did it, with this glass enclosure, was brilliant. The structural elements are curved and seem natural, and they inform the building’s stonework in a way that makes you feel like you’re connecting with the outdoors."

Though the site played into Wright’s interests and strengths as an architect, it seems to have always been fundamentally unsound for long-term building. According to Dana Graham, president of the Palos Verdes Historical Society, the Portuguese Bend landslide is due to a three-foot-wide band of slippery, volcanic bentonite clay that sits about 30 feet underground. "The stuff is like Teflon when it gets wet," Graham says, noting that, when there was a drought a few years back, signs of the slide seemed to temporarily halt.

At the chapel, the sliding land has meant a shifting infrastructure. Though Wayfarers has lost structures due to the slide before—namely a visitor center in the early ’80s—the damage really started to speed up last summer, when Reverend Dan Burchett, executive director of Wayfarers Chapel, says "everything started moving much quicker." The slide caused shattered panes of glass and breaks in the stone-and-concrete foundations of the chapel and its office structure, as well as cracks in the copper wiring that supplies the radiant heating beneath the chapel floor. Burchett says that because of that instability, the Wayfarers team lived without heat in their buildings for a few months before the closure, as they couldn’t rely on the integrity of the gas line.

Though the site’s office structure was built in 2000, with construction standards that are more current than those of the midcentury sanctuary, it’s still subject to that shifting land. "We’re seeing the entire structure being pushed," Burchett said in early March, before Wayfarers leadership decided the site would be disassembled. "There are breaks in the walls, breaks in the walkway, and we’ve had to remove the stairway to our main entrance because it was cracking and heaving. There isn’t a single interior door left that closes the way it’s supposed to, and in the chapel, we’ve had a total of about eight glass [pane] breakages in just the past seven months, when normally we get one break about every couple of years."

All of that movement isn’t just dangerous—it’s expensive. "I have substantial invoices coming across my desk for geologists and survey companies and general contracting companies," Burchett added at the time. "I paid $131,000 in February for cement work that had to be done because of the breaking all around us and we spent $30,000 on asphalt over a period of eight weeks or so in recent months, too. These types of bills continue happening. I had 29 employees when I took this job, and I’ve got five now. We’re down to bare bones and all we can do is just try to hold on to everything until the land stops."

In the Palos Verdes community, there’s been discussion for years about how to slow the slide, or how to effectively remove moisture from that clay. With periods of torrential rain and extreme weather only increasing in recent years, it’s only become more pressing. "It’s increasingly not uncommon to deal with something like this with historic buildings," Fine said in March. "We have to adapt to a changing environment, and sometimes that means moving buildings or raising them or trying some type of other retrofit."

"Every part of the country has its issue that it’s dealing with in terms of how the climate is changing," he added. "We all should be thinking about what that actually means long term, what buildings can adapt and what buildings can’t, and where we should be building in the future. We’re seeing this kind of land movement issue more and more, and it’s going to impact not just Wayfarers, but also other historic buildings that people care about, so we need to be planning ahead." (On September 3, California governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for the city of Rancho Palos Verdes following utility cut-offs to hundreds of homes and businesses due to the ongoing land movement.)

"Deck chairs on the Titanic"

Initially, the Wayfarers team seemed to be buoyed by the idea of dewatering wells, which use pumps to pull groundwater out from underneath surface soil. A residential development above the chapel had been drilling them and, reportedly, projected they’d be able to pull between 160,000 and 200,000 gallons of water from the soil every day. The chapel’s board also discussed installing a 1,000-foot-long French drain, which could help take some groundwater out of the top layer of soil.

But Palos Verdes Historical Society’s president wondered if those actions were only delaying the inevitable. "The problem with things like dewatering wells is that they eventually break, because the soil’s moving," Graham said in March. "I hate to raise the metaphor of the Titanic and the deck chairs, but I honestly think the wells might just give the appearance that something is being done about it, though I will say I’m just a layman and not a geologist. I just think the whole thing is bigger than that."

Some observers thought it might be too late to save the chapel where it sits, suggesting the board might want to consider having it moved to more stable ground. "Relocation has happened with other historic buildings," said Fine, "and it’s always the question of: If it has to be removed—which is always a last resort—how do we do that, and how do we place it in a new location that can evoke a similar context and feeling and experience so that you can maintain the integrity of the place?"

Before the slide really started to pick up, Wayfarers had pulled together a substantial amount of money for a remodel scheduled to begin in November 2025. By March, they’d blown through about 75 percent of that nest egg just on maintenance and salaries. Burchett said the chapel had been dropped by its insurance company, too, meaning that they’ve had to reimburse all the couples whose weddings they had to cancel out of their own accounts, to the tune of about $1.5 million. "Our annual cost for insurance was about $60,000 a year, and now we’re likely not going to get a penny from our policy."

At the time, Burchett said, "We’re in a difficult place, but I feel like peoples’ attitudes are resilient. We’re going to keep fighting until we can’t any longer, and we’re going to do our best to survive this." During the May press conference announcing the chapel’s planned disassembly, his tone only changed slightly, saying that while Wayfarers did not "have the funds to successfully deal with this without community involvement," it planned to organize fundraising efforts, and their commitment to preserving what is perhaps Lloyd Wright’s best-known work was "exactly as it has always been."

Dismantling a masterpiece 

Before the deconstruction began in May, Architectural Resources Group developed a 3D model of Wayfarers Chapel to serve as a record and reference for the existing materials and built elements. At the time, Horak said the "most delicate components of the chapel will be disassembled first, including the massive redwood beams, the network of steel and glass, and the blue roof tiles"—which is especially important given that a number of those materials used to construct the chapel "cannot be replicated today."

Today, the chapel’s coastal lot sits empty, with the organic modern religious structure dismantled and the office complex and a small cottage on the property demolished, since they were newer and not architecturally significant. Burchett says they did manage to save "components of the bell tower" and "as much of the PV [Palos Verdes] stone on the property" as possible to use when they rebuild down the road.

"It was tedious and enormously expensive to do it this way," says Burchett, "but it was the only way that we would be able to preserve the components to be able to rebuild the chapel with the intention of maintaining that National Historic Landmark status." Once all is said and done, he says, the church expects to have spent around $700,000 to dismantle the site. Rebuilding will be another, costlier story, with that estimate running closer to $20 million—not including the potential purchase of a new parcel where the church could sit.

Wayfarers representatives say that should the site stabilize, the chapel could be rebuilt at its original location, though it could take upwards of four years to reopen. Burchett says it’s extremely unlikely they end up back on their original site: "It would be ludicrous for us to rebuild there, even if the city were to permit it." Not only would the building be at risk if there were future slides, but they’d also have a hard time getting property insurance.

Still, Burchett says the Wayfarers team is trying to keep the property in Rancho Palos Verdes and has been in discussion with the city about potential pieces of land. Wherever the building ends up, it will need some restoration—and not just because of the slide. Burchett says that during the dismantling process they realized that some of the structure’s 16 redwood beams had dry rot around the base. While they might not all have to be replaced, at about $35,000 per beam, the cost could escalate quickly. "We won’t know the details of all the work we have to do, but saving and restoring materials is going to be much more expensive than just building a brand new chapel," says Burchett. It’s also going to be more stressful, with Burchett adding that he never would have foreseen the turn his job would take so quickly.

"It’s been challenging," he says, "but it’s also helped me go inward to understand the vital component of life beyond what’s material. In some sense, we had to lay a 73-year-old structure to rest permanently in its first form. But there’s a living part of every one of us that’s beyond material, and, I would say, eternal. It remains alive even when the structure is gone." 

Top photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

This story was updated on May 15, 2024, to add information about the announcement of the Wayfarer Chapel’s dismantling and relocation. It was updated again on October 2, 2024, to reflect the news of its deconstruction.

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