This is an interfaith chapel for two hundred people, built on a site reserved for it in the town plan. The church board asked only that the design serve all members of the community, that it have an element that could be seen from a distance, and that it be made of materials characteristic of the region.

The chapel is typically approached from the south on foot and from the east by car, so it is composed asymmetrically to be seen prominently from either direction. The project sits on the edge of two communities, serving both. There is a park extending to the south. A side garden has been created on the east, with a porch that leads to the cemetery. The land to the immediate north is still forested with scrub pines.

Seaside design guidelines originally reserved recourse to classical architecture for public buildings often overwhelmed by larger private buildings. However, by the time the chapel was designed in 1999, houses had co-opted classical architecture to such a degree that it had lost its power to distinguish public buildings. Classical architecture had been somewhat debased by the obvious ambition of so many overweening classical houses. The chapel still had the obvious advantage of the prominent siting at the head of Ruskin Square, (its siting forward of adjacent

houses of Forest is yet another reference to St. Philip's on Church Street in Charleston) but the building is ultimately distinguished by the scale and detailing of the elevations. It appeals to both the stolid horizontal classical tradition that Lizz and Andres originally imagined for Seaside's public buildings, as well as to the Gothic tradition's verticality. The elevations, inside and out, consist of vertical and horizontal elements playing to a draw.

The Gothic references take two forms. The first is to the rural Alabama Episcopal tradition of carpenter Gothic board and batten churches, which spoke both to an unattainable high church masonry tradition, and to the convenient, and readily attainable economies of balloon framing in a state full of softwood forests. The second reference is structural. The interior masonry piers brace the unsupported height of the three story walls of the sanctuary which are subject to great lateral wind loading.

Alongside references to the high traditions, however, is a general wariness of all high traditions. The chapel - the last public building to be completed at Seaside - was a return to Seaside's vernacular roots; to the open framed beach houses of Robert Davis's youth; to the cracker bungalows of Lizz and Andres' original Seaside codes, and to the stick built Gothic of the rural Alabama bishopric.