This is our building in 2001

The following was prepared by Gregory Free, architect, for the Heritage Homes Tour sponsored by the Heritage Society of Austin, 1995:

In the spring of 1936, the Mission Committee of the United Lutheran Church in America called a meeting of all people interested in the organization of a new congregation in Austin. They found that there were many unaffiliated Lutherans in the community and requested that an English-speaking congregation be established. The charter membership list was begun in the summer with 30 persons. Services began regularly when Pastor Fred W. Kern of Houston accepted the new congregation’s call in September. In the beginning, the congregation met in the First Congregational Church, moving soon to the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs headquarters at 24th Street and San Gabriel. The congregation grew steadily, with the organization of a Sunday School, Cradle Roll, and a Choir. In anticipation of their own building one day, church furniture was donated by the Klaerner family and dedicated in the fall. By January, when the first business meeting was held, 115 attended, adopted a budget, and elected the first vestry, which among many of its tasks, set out to purchase property and hire an architect for a church building.

The site at the corner of Whitis and 30th Street was selected and purchased at a cost of $3,600. Austin native Arthur Fehr was engaged as the building’s architect. Fehr (1904-1969), who had just established his practice in Austin that year, brought great energy and sound training to the project. A 1925 graduate of the University of Texas with a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture, Fehr followed with graduate studies at Columbia University, New York University, and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York City. In the 1930’s, he worked on the Bastrop State Park Project, where he met Charles T. Granger, another Austin native who would later become his partner. Fehr had a varied career, serving as an architectural engineer during World War II, and was inducted into the AIA College of Fellows in 1957. The preliminary floor plans of the new church were submitted in the fall of 1937, and by the beginning of the next year, the elevations were complete and sent to the congregation for approval. Working drawings were completed by that summer. Most likely Fehr’s new partner Granger had a hand in the design of the new church. A recent graduate of the University of Texas with a bachelor’s degree in architecture, Granger had worked in the Los Angeles office of Richard Neutra. He was awarded a fellowship at Cranbrook Academy in 1944, where he received his master’s degree in architecture and urban design. As a student there in Michigan, he worked as a designer in the office of Eliel Saarinen. After the necessary approvals and fundraising, the contract was let for the new building on January 19, 1939, with Rex D. Kitchens as the General Contractor. By that time the congregation had grown to almost 250.
The building’s design defies any traditional stylistic labels. It appears at once to be inspired by the California missions and in some ways the unfinished or unadorned facades of so many vernacular churches throughout southern Europe. The simple geometry of its west elevation features a sole double doorway, a circular window with cruciform muntins, and a simple, flush bellcote. The only relief in the facade plane is the almost imperceptible rusticated surround of the doorway, where the stones seem to elegantly shift forward to articulate the main entrance. All the stonework is exectued in rectangular, quarry-face limestone blocks laid in random horizontal courses.

Traditionally massed into a double height nave with single height side aisles, a large transept on the south containing the children’s chapel follows this same massing, creating a smaller entrance facade facing 30th Street. Three taller rectangular windows at the clerestory level lend light to the nave, while smaller versions punctuate the side aisles, or cloisters. Inside the main entrance, the narthex is a low-ceilinged room finished in dark oak, somber and quiet, intended by the architect and the congretation as a reverent, meditatory space. Immediately behind, one enters the tall nave, beautifully austere with its white plastered walls, dark oak trusses, and ceiling, richly colored stained glass windows, and a tile floor, which the congregation felt gave the church the feeling of a European cathedral. Cylindrical pendants drop between the trusses to provide lighting. The side aisles are divided from the nave by massive piers broken by low segmental arches, while the Chancel and transept areas are entered through two story round arches. The Chancel and Sanctuary are raised two steps, then one step respectively above the floor of the nave. All the furnishings are in dark oak, with the pew ends hand carved by Austin’s famous woodcarver, Peter Mansbendel. The overall effect is a delightful synthesis of the ancient with the modern.
It is possible that the church was acknowledged as one of Austin’s most sophisticated buildings of the 1930’s, because of its many amenities and unusual technological advances, including central heating and cooling, a central speaker system which had special ear phones for the hard of hearing and the capability for commercial broadcasting, and a large neon cross surmounting the bellcote. The First English Lutheran Church is treasured by Austin musicians, particularly choral groups, for its impeccable acoustics.

Over the years, the building has grown gracefully, with contextual addition in the 1950’s of a Parish Hall. The First English Lutheran congregation has always recognized their church as a unique and wonderful building, which explains the remarkable integrity that the building possesses today.