Holabird & Roche. Wesley Foundation, Urbana, Ill., 1925-1926

This collection includes renderings of Chicago architects Holabird & Roche for the proposed Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, the church of the Wesley Foundation at the University of Illinois. Items in the portfolio include drawings of the west and north elevations and blueprints of sections of the chancel and the floor plan, dated Feb. 5 and 12, 1926, and undated. There is also a program for services on Nov. 8, 1925, showing a sketch of the proposed church.

The church was planned to complete a complex begun by the Wesley Foundation Social Center Building (1920-21), on the southwest corner of Green and Goodwin, which Holabird & Roche had designed in 1917 to recall the architecture of Oxford, John Wesley's alma mater. The Depression and other circumstances made it impossible to build the church in the late Gothic style as planned. Rather, in 1959, the Wesley Foundation built a much different, modernist church on the site.

Full documentation of Holabird & Roche's work is on file in the Chicago History Museum (Chicago Historical Society), and is discussed in Robert Bruegmann, Holabird & Roche & Holabird & Root: An Illustrated Catalogue of Works, 1880-1940 (1991), 2:130-34 and 383.