The Church of the Crucifixion by Costas Machlouzarides

It is still being used by the same congregation, who commissioned it, as a church.

The church is in good condition and retains all of its original structure.

The Church of the Crucifixion is three story modernist steel and white concrete building set in a neighborhood of mostly traditional turn of the 20th century architecture. The church has a building footprint of 74’ x 126’ and is contains approximately 14,100 square feet. Its entrance lies on West 149th Street. The first distinctive characteristic of the church are the four cylindrical sections of the main façades. Each curved section serves as a programmatic partition containing the four principal elements of the church. the baptistery, the shrine, the chapel, and the altar. Although each cylinder along 149th Street seems to be uniform in size and composition, they actually slightly differ from each other in a manner that gives a wave-like quality to the façade. Discretely dividing the curved bays and the roof above are narrow slivers of windows that provide defuse indirect lighting for the interior. The second distinctive feature of the church is its air foil shaped cantilevered roof that is reminiscent of La Corbusier’s famous Notre Dame de Haut in Ronchamp, to which it is often compared. The roof has a flat top and a parabolic bottom that seems to project into the mass of the building below. Its moderate slope down away from 149th Street gives the impression that the roof is the wing of a plane on the verge of lifting off. The church rests on a granite base which helps to conceal the foundation of the church that existed on the site previously.

The church began construction in the early part of 1965 and was completed in 1967.

The new Church of the Crucifixion building was, and still is, a modern building set among a traditional late 19th and early 20th century neighborhood. Most of the surrounding building context was brick and brownstone row houses or classically inspired apartment buildings. The exterior of the parish house that borders the main building along 149th Street is, in fact, original and survived the fire that destroyed the preexisting church. Costas Machlouzarides was commissioned in 1965 to design a new building for the congregation and submitted his designs for the white curved modernist church. In 1967 the building was described as, “the most modern church in Harlem, and possibly Manhattan if not the entire city.”

The building is constructed out of reinforced concrete and steel beams with narrow recessed entrances and narrow windows. On the corner, it rests on a granite base which serves to cover the foundations of the previous church. The roof is supported by steel columns on the interior which gives the appearance that it is floating above walls it covers. However, despite its complicated engineering the building has not experienced a great deal of deterioration or structural problems.

The congregation of the Church of the Crucifixion holds an important place in the social context of Harlem. The church was founded in 1916 by Caribbean immigrants from the West Indies who did not feel welcome in the established Episcopal Churches that were in Harlem at that time. The church membership has still retained a large percentage with predominately African American and African Caribbean backgrounds.Costas Machlouzarides helped found AGBANY (the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York) in 1962. The group emerged during the aftermath of the destruction of Penn Station with the wake of social groups calling out for preservation. One newspaper article said that their goal was “to serve notice on present and future would-be vandals, that we will fight them every step of the way.” Other members of the group were Norman Jeffe, Peter Samton, Diana Goldstein, Jordan Gruzen, and Norval White. Machlouzarides also design the the Greater Refuge Temple in 1965 and the Calhoun School in 1975.

The church building was not the first modernist building in Harlem, it was not even the first modern church designed by Costas Machlouzarides in Harlem who also renovated the Refuge Temple Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith on 124th Street and Seventh Avenue. It was still, however, the most radical building of its day. The sloped cantilevered roof and undulating cylindrical bays are representative of the period of time just after the modern movement during the infancy of post modernism. The building makes reference to La Corbusier’s church in Ronchamp with the slanted air foil shaped roof. It copies Ronchamp in both basic form and the manner by which it sits on top of interior structural columns allowing for the illusion that the roof is floating over the walls that are supposed to support it. The building has received mixed reviews from critics and the general public alike. The A.I.A Guide to New York City referred to the building as, “an overdesigned tour de force: a kind of hallucinogenic version of La Corbusier’s Ronchamp.” However, in his book, From Abyssinian to Zion, A Guide To Manhattan's Houses of Worship, David W. Dunlap described the church as “terrifically dynamic.”

Before Machlouzarides’ modernist church underwent construction, the red brick Neo-Gothic Hamilton Grange Reformed Church by Bannister and Schnell was built on the site in 1906. However, in 1937 the Hamilton Grange congregation merged with the Fort Washington Collegiate Reformed Church located at West 181st Street and Ft Washington Avenue and the property rights of the building were sold to the Church of the Crucifixion. The building continued functioning as a church until March of 1963 when it was destroyed in a fire.

The church has not been altered significantly since its construction therefore all of the qualities of the original design are maintained. The building stands in stark contrast to its surround context which makes the building a center of attention in its neighborhood. If not for the large cross projecting from the roof and its similarities to a well known church, the Church of the Crucifixion does not readily identify itself as a religious structure. Despite that, the building has had a dramatic effect on the architectural fabric of Harlem and remains one of the most unusual buildings in New York City.

Gray, Christopher. “A Surprising Architect of the Audacious.” The New York Times. 13 June 2003, p. RE10.. \"Crucifixion To Build New Modern Church" New York Amsterdam News (1962-1993) Apr 29, 1967 ProQuest Historical Newspapers: New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993)pg. 29; "An Ultramodern Church Is Going Up in Harlem: A MODERN CHURCH RISING IN HARLEM" New York Times (1923-Current file) Mar 19, 1967 ProQuest Historical Newspapers pg. R1; "New Church of Crucifixion Planned" New York Times (1923-Current file) Jan 16, 1965 ProQuest Historical Newspapers pg. 18; "Building Modern Episcopal Church"New York Amsterdam News (1962-1993) Apr 15, 1967 ProQuest Historical Newspapers pg 29; Dunlap, David. From Abyssinian to Zion, A Guide To Manhattan's Houses of Worship. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.