Discord at Unity Temple
The church currently needs about a million dollars’ worth of work, most urgently a new central air and heating system to control moisture. But in more than two decades the board had managed to raise only $750,000, and most of it had already gone into the building. Black needed to figure out how to raise the landmark’s profile among prospective philanthropists, and in Wright’s own writings he found a partial answer: the architect had designed Unity Temple to serve not only as a house of worship but also as a venue for secular events like lectures and concerts.
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This Friday, Black will meet with Thomas to discuss the possibility of using Unity Temple for a music series that Black would fund independently, but so far he’s done no booking for the fall. The current series will end in July with a performance by Fred Frith, Larry Ochs, and Miya Masaoka. “It might be reincarnated in a different form,” he says. “But if we can’t do it properly–and this is a horrible thing to say–it makes more sense for the series not to go on.”
Wojcik is also interested in overlooked gems by Gil and Jorge Ben, but future projects depend on the fate of the Costa release. “The minute this works,” he says, “we’ll do more.”
