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Esther McCoy                              12

they first looked at this plans.  

     The next morning the plan for Bethlehem Baptist Church was on the board. My job was to draw in the symbols for electrical outlets so the electrical contractors could make a bid.  Then there were details to draw of the flashing around the cross. When I didn't understand the cross Schindler made some quick rough sketches, but before I had time to ask questions the carpenter was on the phone. Then Schindler was off.
     After he was gone I saw a note at the edge of the board.  "As junior member of the firm would you get someone to clean the office?"  Not only were students and fledgling architects in the war plants or in the service, so were the people who cleaned. I knew that it was to this scarcity that I owed my job.
     The cross was astonishing indeed.  What was visible from the street were two intersecting crosses with the interiors cut away so that eight faces appeared in bold outline.  The memory of crosses filled in the substance that was missing.  The cross was seen in plan from inside the church through squares of glass.  Sitting in a pew one could look up and see the base of the intersecting crosses in the form of a Greek cross.  From the street it was a Latin cross, the arms shorter than the vertical member. From the pews it was a stabile; from the street it was a transparent, shifting mobile.
     How absurdly simple, preposterous in its simplicity.  Its simplicity was somehow an emblem of the present.  The air running