After its founding in 1970 and decades of worship in rented facilities, the Metropolitan Community Church–Dallas, an LGBT congregation of the United Church of Christ, built on this site in 1993. After attending a conference at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the minister, Michael Piazza, commissioned a campus master plan in 1995 from Philip Johnson. The John Thomas Bell Wall, a national AIDS memorial, was built in 2000, and the Congregational Life Center (not a Johnson design) was dedicated in 2002. A future cathedral is included in the master plan.
The Interfaith Peace Chapel was the last work sketched by Philip Johnson before his death in 2005. The 175-seat chapel is open to all faiths. Battered and curved wall planes define a rising succession of three irregular, interlocking masses, to a crescendo of space and light above the altar. Double-framed walls dampen the sound from the adjacent airport and allow for deeply recessed windows, some hinting at Gothic forms, others biomorphic. Control joints make random lines across the white stucco. While the angularity of the forms may seem crystalline, the gentle curves and bows are more gelatinous in appearance. The chapel will become a lower appendage to Johnson’s proposed 2,500-seat cathedral, which will rise from the chapel’s 45-foot height to 117 feet along a curved line that parallels the flight path of the Love Field runway to the north. The shapes of the modest chapel will be amplified into great folded and pleated walls of the cathedral.