Church of the New Jerusalem
- Architect
- Herbert Langford Warren
- Year
- 1901
- Style
- Gothic Revival
- City
- Boston, MA
The Church of the New Jerusalem, also known as Swedenborg Chapel, went up in 1901 at 50 Quincy Street in Cambridge as the chapel for the New Church Theological School, training ground for Swedenborgian ministers. The architect was Herbert Langford Warren, founder of Harvard's architecture program, who designed the Gothic Revival building on land carved from the old Jared Sparks estate. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
the building
Parish House addition. In 1965 Cambridge architect Arthur H. Brooks, Jr. added a Parish House at the chapel's northeast corner, expanding a building originally sized for a small theological school and its affiliated congregation.
the style
Warren designed the chapel in a Gothic Revival idiom, giving the theological school's home the pointed-arch vocabulary of mainstream Protestant churches of the period, even as the small chapel scale kept it modest rather than monumental.
More on Gothic Revivalthe architect
Herbert Langford Warren (1857-1917) founded the Harvard School of Architecture, now the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was also a founding member of the Cambridge Swedenborgian congregation and the son of a Swedenborgian missionary, which made him a natural choice to design the school's chapel.
significance
The chapel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The New Church Theological School that built it later relocated to Berkeley, California, and in 2002 the Swedenborg School of Religion sold the building to the Cambridge Society of the New Jerusalem, the congregation that had worshipped there.