Breathing new life into aging spaces presents unique challenges. Culturally significant buildings must sustainably evolve to retain meaning for future generations. Over the last three installments, I’ve documented my ongoing research funded by the Arizona Architecture Foundation into how historic sacred spaces adapt to modern needs. The principal case studies, the Stone Avenue Temple in Tucson and Temple Beth Israel in Phoenix, have highlighted the difficulties in restoring and sustaining these institutions. These stories reveal how creative fundraising and adaptive reuse allowed them to continue serving their communities as museums for Holocaust education. However, not every abandoned synagogue can become a memorial without risking the depletion of already limited resources or, worse, the oversaturation of the very meaning they aim to preserve

Given these challenges, I looked for examples in other communities to understand their approach to preserving and reimagining sacred spaces. In the fourth and final installment in the series, I sat down with Jack DeBartolo 3 FAIA, principal of the Phoenix-based debartolo architects, whose exquisite contemporary portfolio includes several religious projects across the Valley. As a man of Christian faith, DeBartolo offered valuable insights into rethinking the design of sacred spaces to more effectively resonate in a rapidly secularizing world.

How much of your practice focuses on religious architecture?

It varies from time to time. Our practice is focused on serving people and organizations who align with our values. There are times when nearly 70% of our work can have a faith-based focus, but [I get] a little uncomfortable when a majority falls into any one category. We don't necessarily want to feel typecast as church architects. It may sound like that's our focus, but in actuality, we just want to serve good people whose values align with our own.

‍Fair enough. Even so, it isn’t the most common typology. What prompted the focus? Was it circumstantial? Mission-oriented? Typological?

It started by answering the phone and expressing positivity when my father and I began the practice in the late nineties. We’ve always wanted to work with people who share our values... who care about their kids, people, life, death, ceremony, and memory; about the metaphysical and pragmatic nature of how we live. We asked how we could do things we value that have a purpose; that are significant... People with those interests seem to seek us out. 

We find it far easier to give our best when we’re driven by [our clients’] cause, purpose, and vision. Our studio’s focus is a response to our sense of meaning. We work for and serve many clients who don’t share our faith; however, in those cases, we often share other passions. The agreement to work with a client comes from who we are and what we believe in. I want to work for good people that we respect. And many of them come with good values. We can’t work on something where every decision is made because of market trends. We want to make meaningful work, period.

Have you found there’s a conversation happening as your work progresses, where perhaps the faith-based work is informing the secular and vice-versa?

For sure. Because we all need it constantly. Sometimes, the sacred moments that catch you by surprise are more important than the intentional ones. If I'm standing in a beautiful synagogue during the perfect time of day when the light is coming in, that's great... that ought to work. But there are other moments when light streams where you don’t expect it to. There’s this magical holiness and you think, “Wow, that is the very same sun that's been shining and warming the earth since creation.”

We don't believe there's a partition between our sacred life and our profane life. I don't agree with Eliade about the separation. I believe strongly that, based on the creation mandate, all of it is sacred. Yes, there are times when you would say, “Those are real sacred activities or spiritual exercises.” In actuality, we believe all of life - meetings like this, getting together for coffee, serving a client, helping realize a building... we might call it ordinary life, but all of it can be quite extraordinary. 

Have the issues faced by the communities you serve noticeably evolved in your working lifetime?

Problems have changed over time; however, it’s probably not what you think. Early on in our practice, say the first decade, our clients were extremely trusting and the amount of design freedom seemed very high and almost without specific questions. There was a sense that as long as our designs solved their pragmatic problems, we were free to develop unique responses and they trusted our sense of place, materiality, use of light, and composition of experience. More recently, in the last 5-10 years, there seems to be a shift toward more skepticism and less trust. This is hard for me.

‍Like many architectural typologies, religious projects are fraught with social and economic issues that can tarnish the experience for architects and end users alike. Have you confronted issues that made you question your participation in this arena? 

Yes - all these constraints affect our ability to make architecture and reduce the project to mere buildings. We know that souls matter more than inanimate space, but we also know that space matters and that God cares about place [Acts 17:24-27]. We have issues that make us question our participation all of the time, but this is the challenge of making architecture. Every project is filled with challenges. One will have plenty of financial resources, but the lead client is nearly inaccessible and communication is sparse and difficult. One will have too many voices involved in the decision-making process. One will have great decision-making, but fear of communicating the vision to the people who fund the project. 

‍What role does existing infrastructure play in the conversation (Redemption Arcadia in Phoenix is a fantastic example)? What’s been your experience with repurposing existing buildings in response to community needs and cultural narratives? 

Many of our clients want us to look at reusing their current facilities or help find a building and consider adaptive reuse... 

Redemption Arcadia has an interesting story. The congregation aged out and they were down to the last four or five members from the original board. The pastor was still alive, but he was no longer teaching. The building was being leased out to smaller churches, but they received offers from developers to buy the land and turn it into multifamily housing.

For the community, the buildings were already paid for and none of them saw it as a money grab. The pastor was retired, but he couldn’t see the church sold to become multifamily housing. So they went out to look for another church that might want to buy the property and give it a second life.

They put it out to about five major churches and interviewed each one. Ours was a site walk we participated in with Neil Pitchell, who was CFO of Redemption Church at the time. He was thinking about money and I was thinking about design and he took me aside and asked, “Can you save this thing? Is it worth it?”

It was hard to tell. The whole building was covered up with stucco. It was very confusing. I got the sense that they weren’t frame walls but masonry underneath all of that icing. The only thing I could think to do was sandblast the stucco and remove almost everything that wasn't masonry. We did some exploratory demolition to figure out what we could save. The process revealed three masonry rectangles underneath all those layers: the worship building, the classroom building, and a little pool house that could house the administration. It was maybe 15,000 square feet in total - very small for a whole church. And yet, through the programming process, we figured out how to make it work.

They loved the idea of having a lobby that wasn’t so interiorized, but part of the neighborhood. We felt that was a good idea because we couldn’t fit a new lobby inside anyway. So we asked, “What if your lobby is actually in an outdoor shaded space in full view of Camelback Road?” They were intrigued so we developed the concept and began to think about wrapping the structure with perforated metal. We could reduce thermal heat gain while at the same time shaping usable outdoor spaces through shading. 

The simple idea of extraction left us with three raw structures. It’s a delightful little project because the church has come to love those buildings. They have a renewed value, by God's grace, because of what we exposed underneath the stucco. It felt real. It felt substantial. And so now it has this enduring quality. Underneath it all, we were able to preserve something that, I think, will get passed on to the next generation. 

I believe we were the only ones who said we'd save the buildings. I think that's why they ended up choosing us. They sold the building to Redemption Church for a fraction of what they could have sold it to a developer for. They wanted to make sure the pastor was taken care of and a few other things were paid off, but the whole point was to make sure the buildings were in good hands.

‍These are exactly the types of stories my research has focused on thus far. The work has revealed an interesting pattern of communities revisiting and reshaping culturally significant ancestral spaces as well. Do you see much of that in the communities you work with? Particularly those that have had longer histories in specific territories?

Unfortunately, I’m afraid we may not leave much value to the next generation from our current way of thinking about architecture as it relates to the evangelical church. The de-emphasis on physical space has created a glut of mediocrity and banality that typically generates bad buildings with nothing more than trendy entrances. We’re seeing small glimmers of hope from the next generation who may not be able to afford it yet, but appreciate buildings constructed in real materials that have structural and permanent value, qualities of daylight in worship spaces, rational and thoughtfully laid out spaces that transcend pragmatic need and begin to focus on the majesty of God or the phenomenological qualities of creation...

…[from an adaptive reuse perspective], we need more projects like Tate Modern in London, where a massive turbine hall was turned into a modern art museum. We need to think of better uses for the buildings we already have. Those that can be used more than once a week. Our churches should be considering how they can team with other creative users to create more interesting cultural centers and community hubs that reduce the capital expense of buildings that remain empty for six days of the week.

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My conversation with Jack DeBartolo 3 reinforced the notion that preserving culturally significant buildings is about more than structural adaptation—it’s about evolving meaning. While these projects demand technical skills, they also require a sincere dedication to translating collective memory into enduring spaces. Their approach has had a lasting impact on how I think about design in this context. 

As the research continues, I look toward projects and communities that view architecture as a vessel for cultural narratives—particularly through the lens of the historic synagogues in Arizona, where the two represent a remarkable historical throughline. From ancient mythologies and diasporic traditions to early settlements that grew into contemporary cities, the buildings embody a distinct intellectual and cultural lineage.

These experiences have underscored the belief that preserving such structures isn’t about simply honoring the past, but aligning what we know with what we hope to become; acknowledging that the spaces we shape today hold the power to move future generations.