Monroe Street Abbey courtyard
COURTESY BILL TIMMERMAN

Monroe Street Abbey Is an Armature from the Past for the Future

Discover how Jones Studio transformed the ruins of a former Baptist church in Phoenix into a community-centered garden and event venue. 

They peered through the boarding of what was left of the church. What they saw, back in 2010, was an open space where there had once been pews in which the hundreds of congregants of Phoenix’s First Baptist Church gathered. The structure was now open to the sky and partially covered with weeds. “We found our site,” Arizona architect Eddie Jones of Jones Studio remembers exclaiming. Together with fellow architect Michael P. Johnson and landscape architect Chris Winters, he was looking for an opportunity to try out “armature architecture,” an idea developed by “organic” architect Herb Greene that posits buildings should be open constructions allowing for flexible uses over time. In the former evangelical Baptist church, they saw the potential to do so.

Luckily for them, the site was controlled by an equally visionary member of the community: former Phoenix mayor and Arizona attorney general Terry Goddard. His housing nonprofit organization, the Housing Opportunity Center, owned the area in which the church stood, and he wanted to build up to 100 low-income apartments in and around the shell of the sanctuary that had burned out in 1984. 

Monroe Street Abbey exterior
The building includes a four-story main structure and a seven-story bell tower at the front corner of the church. In the late 1940s, a two-story stucco extension was added to the west side, preserving the Gothic Revival design of the original facade.

After engaging several architects and engineers, it was determined housing at this scale wouldn’t be feasible, and instead the team erected 94 units of affordable housing on the lot next door to the ruin. Then, the team was faced with the question of what to do with the rest of the remains that had already been shored up and stabilized. “All I knew was that public space in courtyards—something that is common in Europe and that is central to community building—is hard to come by in the United States outside of hotel atriums,” recalls Goddard. “I wanted to do something filled with activity, performances, and community gatherings.” One of his associates, community activist Katherine Patry, argued vociferously for preserving the church.

Restoring the Italian Gothic Revival Structure

The process of restoring the structure has taken 40 years from the day the church burned out and 10 years since the architects approached the client with their idea of what Jones Studio associate Maria Salenger calls “not all-purpose but purposeless space”—by which she means space that invites invention for its use. In that period, the team developed plans that called for the most minimal acts of restoration, which aimed at ensuring the structure was safe and usable and, as Jones puts it, “making sure the history of the place was there for everyone to see.” To accomplish this, they worked with restoration specialists EverGreene, who told them, says Jones, that they wanted to “leave no fingerprints on the result.” 

Now called Monroe Street Abbey, the church’s Italian Gothic Revival structure has been restored. It is ready to serve its community with a sheltered courtyard garden with native plants and a central performance space. A new steel-and-concrete decking framework fits into the existing shell, providing new balconies and stabilizing the masonry shell. The team air-conditioned, added sprinklers, and provided plumbing for 40,000 square feet of space that will be serviced by a full catering and restaurant kitchens once finished. Just as important, they carefully cleaned and stabilized not only those south-facing windows and doors that remained, but also the plaster fragments that still clung to some of the walls as evidence of the Abbey’s history. The space of the original auditorium (or narthex) is now the open courtyard Goddard called for. Winters landscaped with a combination of native and arid adapted species in the courtyard and the surrounding streetscape in such a way so as not to interfere with whatever events or functions might take place in a space rated for up to 689-person occupancy in the courtyard and 95 in the level two balcony. Steel scaffolding provides support for performance lighting. The courtyard was named Katherine’s Garden for Patry, who passed away during the construction process.

Monroe Street Abbey courtyard
The conservation efforts included restoring the central rose window, salvaging existing doors and windows, repairing masonry and plaster, and thoroughly cleaning the interior.

How Monroe Street Abbey Serves the Community

The group finished the restoration in a manner that indeed leaves it as the kind of armature Greene envisioned in his 1981 book Building to Last: Architecture as Ongoing Art. Though Goddard made initial arrangements with operators for event rentals and a restaurant, he resisted the notion of giving the whole complex over to one entity because “I envisioned arts and community use, not just wedding rentals.” Only now that the Abbey is finished is he negotiating with several different entities to operate there. The fact that a 22-story residential building has gone up next door, part of an apartment building boom to the east of the project, has made what once seemed an idealistic vision considerably more realistic. While the project is designed for public use and community purposes, new operators will help determine just how public all the spaces will be. 

The Abbey’s architecture reflects the openness and light touch both the client and architects sought. Eschewing a strategy that would cover over the marks of the fire, neglect, and the ways nature had crept into the site, the group of architects worked to preserve what was left of plaster and exposed brick, marks of paint, and fragments of the original structure, while also exposing the new elements that were used to shore up the building. The result is a collage of materials, colors, textures, and forms that is a stellar example of what I call imaginative reuse: architecture that not only preserves what we have inherited from the past but reveals it and opens it up for multiple interpretations and uses.

Monroe Street Abbey bar space
The building includes meeting rooms, studios, and a future restaurant and bar.

“We have a bad habit of erasing history in Phoenix—everybody here thinks the place started with their arrival,” notes Goddard. He sees the Abbey as an embodiment of the city’s traditions and future. “The more people are aware of what is here, both nature and what we have made, the more the place becomes real,” adds Jones. “This is a beautiful place nine months of the year, but we [usually design] for the hellscape of the remaining three months” so that everything is air-conditioned; “now that we have an [exterior] space, we can enjoy what is so beautiful about Phoenix [for most of the year].” 

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