A California church is reborn with uncanny light.

From the first day, light has been the fundamental metaphor of religious revelation and a raw material with which architects have long shaped religious space. The first rays of dawn still crack through temples in Egypt and the Druidic monoliths in Stonehenge, Divine light filters through stained-glass windows in Gothic cathedrals and hidden sources in Baroque churches. The art and mystery of light, however, often eluded Modernists because glass diffused light and decreased the sense of its rarity and specificity. Housed in an A-frame church, vintage 1954, with a dated and lugubrious interior, the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church in Encino, California, hired a local firm, Abramson Teiger Architects of Culver City, to create a more uplifting congregational space. The basic structure of the church becomes a luminous backdrop for the backlit planes, which read as silhouettes floating in space. The architects have succeeded not just in lightening the church, but in making it buoyant.