Thorncrown Chapel: Glass and Wood in the Ozark Forest

A few miles west of downtown Eureka Springs, on a wooded hillside off a county road, stands one of the most celebrated works of American architecture of the twentieth century. Thorncrown Chapel was designed by the Arkansas architect E. Fay Jones, who had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright and developed his own approach to buildings that grow from their surroundings rather than imposing on them.

Jones completed Thorncrown in nineteen eighty for a retired schoolteacher named Jim Reed, who owned the land and wanted a nondenominational chapel in the woods where travelers could stop and be still. Jones faced a practical constraint that became the key to the design. The forest site was reachable only by a footpath too narrow for heavy equipment, which meant no piece of lumber or glass could be larger than what two people could carry by hand.

Working within that limit, Jones created a structure sixty feet long and forty-eight feet tall, built of wood and flagstone with thousands of small panes of glass set in a lattice of thin wooden members. From inside the chapel, the walls largely dissolve, and the surrounding trees become the dominant visual experience. The American Institute of Architects ranked Thorncrown among the greatest works of American architecture of the twentieth century, placing it in company with buildings that cost orders of magnitude more and required far fewer constraints.

Jones went on to design other chapels in a similar spirit, but Thorncrown, the first and the most constrained, remains the one that draws architecture students and quiet seekers from around the world.