The Music Director of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church takes us on an excursion through some fascinating church history.

Charles Haertling History (Part One)

By Donald Zimmermann, DMA

The year 2012 celebrates the 50th anniversary of the construction and dedication of the 1962 additions to the sanctuary of Our Savior's Lutheran Church. I had planned to write this history of the building project before the recent discussion of the future use of the complex, so these comments may now be of even more relevance.

Often the objects of condescension, misunderstanding, or outright hatred, examples of modern architecture are today in as much danger of being destroyed as landmark 19th-century homes and churches were bulldozed in the 1960s. The famous I.M. Pei paraboloid in downtown Denver will be as much missed as the 1901 Antlers Hotel in downtown Colorado Springs. The chapel at the Air Force Academy, now the most visited tourist attraction in Colorado, aroused a storm of criticism and controversy when it was built in the early 1960s at the same time as our additions.

The history of the Our Savior's additions starts in the 1950s when the congregation approached 900 members. Everyone went to church in those postwar baby-boom years. There was a choir of nearly 40 singers in 1957 and three services had to be held in the small sanctuary. A severe lack of room for Sunday School classes, offices, and meeting space resulted in the congregation approaching various local architects to submit proposals for additions in 1961.

The church finally accepted perhaps the most radical of the proposals from the rising young modernist architect Charles A. Haertling (1928-1984) of Boulder. He was a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright and Antoni Gaudi, the eccentric designer of the Sacrada Familia Church in Barcelona, Spain. Haertling moved to Boulder in 1953 and opened his own architectural firm in 1957. He is best known for designing many fine houses in Boulder as well as St. Stephen's Lutheran Church at 10828 N. Huron in Northglenn, Colorado. Go and see it some time! [The church is also pictured on the right.]

Haertling had an impressive life in addition to his skill as an architect. An environmentalist and preservationist, he was actively involved with the city of Boulder acquiring its greenbelt open space, the building of the Pearl Street Mall, and the founding of Historic Boulder. He was deputy mayor of Boulder in 1970-71 and was the national president of the Lutheran Society of Worship, Music and the Arts in the 1970s. A lifelong Lutheran, he combined a solid theological foundation and a knowledge of church music with his concepts of modern architecture. His wife Vi Haertling was the organist at Grace Lutheran Church on the Hill in Boulder for many years, and I knew her when I was a doctoral church music student at the University of Colorado in the 1970s.

Next month: Our Savior's debates and accepts part of Haertling's proposal. Read the second article.