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Trendiness vs. timelessness

Lewis Dominy, AIA, president of Dominy + Associates, a 23-person design firm in San Diego, has found an unusual niche. Church design and restoration accounts for three-quarters of the firm’s volume. The lesson Dominy has learned is one that applies to all disciplines and markets: “trendiness,” he says, is to be avoided at all cost, in favor of “timelessness.”

Polished porcelain tile. Courtesy Portobello.

To date, Dominy has worked on 120 churches, mostly in Southern California, occasionally in Arizona and New Mexico. He says he has learned to guess, before being told, the date of a church’s last restoration.

“Colors and patterns define the period,” Dominy says. “The churches of the 1970s were dominated by orange colors; those of the 80s, by mauve. We now try very hard not to be too strong with color. As a rule, the more permanent the element the more neutral we are with color.”

“In the current issue of Faith and Form (the magazine devoted to religious architecture),” says Dominy, “is an article studying Richard Meier’s Jubilee Chapel in Rome, a display of travertine and white. It is gorgeous in its simplicity. That is sometimes the hardest thing to do.”

At the Solana Beach presbyterian Church in San Diego, Dominy is using cream-colored Brazilian tile with verde green accents to create a 6,000 sq. ft. pinwheel pattern on the floor that is the focal point of the sanctuary. “We looked at slate and a number of other materials,” he says. We decided on porcelain tile for a number of reasons: First of all, tile permits you to have very small grout joints. It is also extremely hard. It is durable and it has a lot less ‘texture’ than natural materials. All those elements make tile very attractive from a maintenance standpoint.

“Our energy laws here in California also allow us energy credits for using tile. When used on southern exposures, it acts as a heat sink,” Dominy says.