DXA studio collaborated with Justin Davidson of New York Magazine's Curbed to develop a proposal to save a landmarked church that had fallen into disrepair. West Park Presbyterian was built on Manhattan’s Upper West Side between 1883-1890. It was inspired by the architecture of H.H. Richardson and attended by a distinguished congregation. In 1911, the New York Times deemed the Romanesque Revival church the “millionaires’ gate to heaven.” Today the congregation barely numbers a dozen. They have no pastor. The church’s assets were sold, staff was reduced, and operating funds were reallocated to pay for repairs. In 2022 the building was declared unfit to be occupied. The congregation has applied for a hardship exception that would allow them to raze the building and sell the property to a developer.

Heeding the lessons of landmarks lost to well-intentioned regulation that has too often proven onerous and brittle, DXA studio takes a long view of preservation as diachronic, flexible, and dedicated to preserving continuity between the past, present, and future. Tasked with finding a financially viable way to develop apartments on the site that would also fund the preservation and upkeep of the church, the studio began with a rigorous analysis of local zoning regulations. Having determined how much residential area the lot could yield, a scenario that gave a portion of the church’s existing footprint to a tower tucked behind, and another that inserted apartments into the existing structure, were studied alongside a third that built directly up from the church, filling the space delimited by adjacent structures to the north and east.

This third proposal takes the existing structure as the point of departure. It seeks to be generous and deferential to the church and its context without sacrificing quality or relinquishing its own identity. Glowing translucent stone and semi-transparent glass rise out of the red sandstone church below, in facets that spring from the geometry of the existing façade. Floor-to-floor heights align with the neighboring architecture, drawing it into the composition. The church remains intact, ceding only its roof to the tower above. This new hybrid flickers through the cycles of daily life and the weekly rhythm of the parish as the church and residential tower alternate between dormant and active states, transforming from opaque masses to glowing volumes.

Surrendering a landmark to economically necessitated neglect signals a failure of imagination. Saving it requires a vision of the future rich with pluralities — a future in which our heritage of buildings survives in measure with the flexibility and care they are given to grow into their mature form and find renewed relevance in the context of cities that embrace evolution. Mutually defined and symbiotic, the church and the tower stand in, both literally and poetically, for the sacred and profane. But in a pluralistic inversion, the sacred status of Landmark must be breached if the church is to survive, and the profane concerns of capital and daily routines conjoined as essential partners, without which the sacred would cease to exist.