It was 60 years ago, at the start of his career, but the architect and educator John P. Eberhard remembers the very moment the idea came to him for what would be his seminal creation: the modular church. He’d been approached to design a chapel for a new congregation in Champaign-Urbana—a kind of starter church that could be erected quickly, disassembled, and moved when the congregation outgrew it. “I remember having ideas roll around in my head about what it could be,” Eberhard recalls. “I remember when I got the big idea: visiting my parents, sitting in their bedroom, rocking in a rocker. All of a sudden, into my head came this whole idea of designing a chapel out of wood panels bolted together, with equilateral trusses, two-by-twelves with split-ring connectors, four-by-eight plywood panels. The whole idea was there.”
Out of that flash of insight came a business— Creative Buildings, Inc., which in the 1950s sold more than 100 prefab churches around the country—and a lifelong interest in the nature of creativity by Eberhard, former chair of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon. His account of an idea’s arriving, fully formed, seemingly out of nowhere, corresponds closely with how at least one classical musician approached composing. While walking or resting, he wrote, melodies would come into his mind “whence and how, I know not,” taking root and growing until the piece “stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance.” The composer was Mozart.
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