Chapel of the Holy Cross
— the rock that learned to hold a cross.
Not only on a wall.
“A modernist chapel built into a sandstone spur on the south edge of Sedona, between the Twin Buttes. Marguerite Brunswig Staude drew the first sketches in the early 1930s and saw it finished in 1956. The cross is ninety feet. From the road below, the building reads less as architecture set onto rock than as rock that learned to stand up straight.
Chapel of the Holy Cross, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Chapel of the Holy Cross stands on a 250-foot red-sandstone spur south of Sedona, Arizona, inside Coconino National Forest. Sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude commissioned the design in the early 1930s and worked through several sites, including a shelved Hungarian location, before settling on the present one. Architects Anshen and Allen of San Francisco completed the building in 1956. The site lies at about 4,500 feet between two formations locally known as the Twin Buttes, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix operates the chapel today.
The front of the chapel faces roughly southwest and catches the long afternoon, when the sandstone behind the cross moves from rust through ember to red-bronze. Sedona sits in a transition zone above four thousand feet, and the angle of the late sun is steeper than further south in the Sonoran. Late October between four and five p.m. is the most cited hour, when contrast between the white concrete cross and the warming cliff peaks. Summer monsoon clouds break the light into intervals.
The chapel is reached by a half-mile spur off State Route 179, about three miles south of the Sedona Y. A ramped walkway climbs from the lower parking area to the chapel entry. Hours are generally 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, with a Monday-evening prayer service at 5. Admission is free and donations support upkeep. Parking fills by mid-morning in spring and fall; the city's Sedona Shuttle covers the trailhead from town. Tripods inside the chapel are not permitted.