Once the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, razes its building — as is now the church’s confirmed right — photographs are all that will remain of the Brutalist bunker. Take a good look now, because it won’t be long before 16th and Eye NW looks quite different — and almost certainly less architecturally distinct.

D.C. planning director Harriet Tregoning said that the building was an “experiment” that had “failed badly.” No doubt, she had little say in the matter: U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson pressed the issue by threatening to overrule a decision that guides the ways in which a city can declare a church an historic building.

In what ways did the building fail? The case against the building never felt very, well, concrete: The argument that the building was not warm and inviting presupposes that Christian science is an attractive faith whose success was hindered by design. I for one do find it warm and inviting — as an idea, as one of D.C.’s few and beleaguered modern buildings, and as a structure with some symbolic punch — though I’m not a church adherent. The subjective argument came hand in hand with complaints about the building’s maintenance expenses, which were understandable. High design sometimes means high upkeep, in particular for work from the modern period.

The church might say that the failure was experimenting in the first place. The organization plans to replace it with a design that sounds safe: a smaller church in a mixed-use facility. Will that mean offices or condos? Design pending, the only architectural question that remains in this debate is about function: how best to cash in on this primo location.

Photo by mosley.brian