Immaculate Conception Church

I still remember the first time I saw Immaculate Conception Church (1963, 7211 W. Talcott Avenue.) We were hurrying out to O’Hare, southbound on Harlem to pick up the Interstate. Despite my attention being divided by dodging through traffic, my jaw dropped when I saw its looming cylinder of unbroken stained glass.

Immaculate Conception Church

It was immediately obvious that this building had a completely over-the-top case of Midcentury madness. It was More MidCentury Than Thou.

Immaculate Conception Church

Some months later, I found time for a closer inspection. The details confirmed my original impressions. Top to bottom, this building pulled no punches. It used every MidCentury trick in the book.

Immaculate Conception Church

Immaculate Conception Church

Immaculate Conception Church

Today, I finally got to go inside the building. Despite the grand setup, I was still blown away by the interior. The level of detail on the outside pales before the onslaught that awaits within.

Immaculate Conception Church

One enters the sanctuary by passing through the glass cylinder, and it is of course top-to-bottom stained glass, waves of bright color pouring in on arriving worshipers.

Immaculate Conception Church

The sanctuary itself is spatially plain, open and airy, but festooned with decoration and ornament.

Immaculate Conception Church

Overhead, a series of false skylights filled with stained glass designs bring colored light in from above. More of the stained glass designs pour down the towering windows.

Immaculate Conception Church

One-inch glazed tile coats the columns, the walls, and the floor of the altar space. The pastor commented that he finds it a bit like being in a swimming pool. Be that as it may, I’ve never seen a swimming pool with polished-gold tile patterns!

Remember those colored tiles on the outside? They aren’t just for decoration:

Immaculate Conception Church

If they look familiar, they should: colored glass block like this is a staple of the Chicago Midcentury style. So is the combo of cream-colored brick with baby blue highlighting patterns. Not only is Immaculate Conception a deliriously exuberant piece of Modernism, it’s also a localized design, in tune with the regional 1960s vernacular.

Immaculate Conception Church

The stained glass designs, by Chicago’s Michaudel Stained Glass Studio, are modern in their way. They lack the subtleties of an Emil Frei design, but the abstract patterns of flowing color, the drifting text, and the stylized figures all set the designs firmly apart from their Gothic and Renaissance antecedents. There is a cartoon-like punchiness to the designs; the windows are big and bold, loud and clear.

Oh, and I guess I shouldn’t have said that nuclear explosions aren’t “standard church fare“, because, here you go!

Immaculate Conception Church

Immaculate Conception Church

I’m still reeling from the visit. I could go again and again. In fact, if my DSLR camera ever gets out of the shop, I almost certainly will.

Immaculate Conception Church

7 thoughts on “Immaculate Conception Church

  1. I’m a fan of both this and your old Milwaukee site, so I thought I’d suggest looking at Sacred Heart of Jesus church on south KK in St. Francis. I went past it a couple of weeks ago, and it uses the colored glass blocks you like.(Nowhere near as cool as the one in your current post.)

  2. Hello Robert,I have always been a silent fan of Immaculate Conception Church. Perhaps, since I am a modernist, I can't stop looking at it as I drive by on Harlem or Talcott. I remarked often that I loved the architecture, pointing that out to my Mom who said she hated it. This past June, when she passed away, we needed to obtain the elements kit for the Mass/Eucharist. And where did we finally get them? From Immaculate Conception Parish! And now I keep thinking of it. :)Well, your site picks out all of the elements that delight me, too.Thanks!

  3. I found this googling Michaudel Stained Glass. I'd be willing to bet that the architects are Belli and Belli; I've seen those tiled round columns before. Other than that, words fail.

  4. Immaculate Conception Church was designed by Richard V. Wagener of Meyer and Cook. He was a graduate of the University of Detroit School of Architectural Engineering. Ground was broken on Nov. 13, 1960. Cardinal Albert Meyer dedicated the church on May 26, 1963. At the time, Mr. Wagener wrote, “This church was designed to be rich in symbolism with a dramatic and worshipful atmosphere in a contemporary style all its own.”

  5. This is my church my whole life. Its a very beautiful church. Has slot to offer with programs fir you g kids & teens. But i noticed that you left out that this is the NEW CHURCH that was finished in 1963. Immaculate Conception’s original Church is the school gymnasium where I was baptisted in 1957. I tried to find more info for you so you could update. I will keep looking. Anyone raised in this area for a long time know this to be true.

  6. Immaculate Conception Parish began in 1904 as a retreat of the Passionist priests on part of 54 rural acres that the Catholic religous order’s Vice-Provincial, Fr. Felix Ward, C.P., secured from the Burham estate a year earlier. Fr. Ward celebrated the first parish Mass at the summer quarters of nearby St. Vincint’s Asylum on April 10,1904. Five months later, on Labor Day, the parish church moved to a new 35′ x 75 ‘ white wood frame structure built by Nichol & Sons contractors. When a new brick monastery was built and dedicated on June 12, 1910, services moved to its chapel to make room for a one-room school. They returned to the wood structure in 1926 after classes moved to the new red brick school building to the west. To accomodate the parish’s rapidly-growning congregation, worship moved again on Easter Sunday, April 17, 1938, to what was to be a larger “temporary” church in the new school’s converted auditorium. Parishioners, friends and seminariians performed much of the work so that the parish spent only $12,000 on required renovation. Crowded worship expanded even more to the school’s basement assembly hall for simultaneous Masses in the later1950’s.. Immaculate Conception Church remained within the school building until 1963 when the present church opened and school space reverted to a gymnasium. The monastery building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 6, 2013. The Passionist Fathers transferred ownership and operation of Immaculate Conception Parish to the Archbishop of Chicago in the same year.

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