St. John's Lutheran Church Architectural Heritage

St. John's Lutheran Church is one of Knoxville's prominent early 20th Century buildings.  Built in 1913 in the late Gothic Revival style of architecture, the church stands as a unique presence on Emory Place along with several turn-of-the-century commercial buildings.  The church was designed by local architect R. F. Graf.

Gothic architecture is characterized by its pointed arches (as opposed to the round arches of the Greek and Roman Classical styles); buttresses; and tracery, i.e., applied or cut-out decoration in circular or curvilinear (S-shaped or flowing leaf-like) patterns.

Although St. John's was constructed on the scale of a parish church, the building has the essential Gothic features of the 13th and 14th European cathedrals, including pointed arches that shape windows and doorways, exterior buttresses that reinforce the stone wall between the large memorial windows, and tracery in the English Decorated style.  Stone, tile, and stained glass, materials which were used extensively by the medieval craftsman, are a part of St. John's construction.  The Emory Place window with its curvilinear stone tracery is St. John's adaptation of the traditional "rose window."  The four spires on the bell tower are embellished with vertical rows of small stone crockets (a Gothic detail that resembles stylized foliage).  Tracery cut-outs in a quartrefoil (4-cusp) design repeats along the balustrades at the roof line.

The church's interior also reflects the Gothic style.  The dominant building material is oak, stained dark.  Wood tracery characterized by inflected arches, or "ogees" (S-curves), is applied to the wainscot that lines the sanctuary.  This tracery can also be found on the furnishings, railings, on the nave's double doors and stained-glass window wall, and on the parlor fireplace.    A hammerbeam truss (similar to the 14th Century truss designed for Westminister Hall in London) vaults St. John's sanctuary.  The massive oak hammerbeams that project from the wall are supported by arched braces.  Above the side aisles, oak circles with trefoil cutouts rest on the beams as part of the truss's support system.  Smaller circles are repeated higher in the vaulting.  This elegant hammerbeam truss transmits the weight and thrust of the roof to the masonry walls.  The entire ceiling is of select quartered oak.  At its peak, the ceiling rises close to 40 feet.

Each of the nine stained-glass windows in the sanctuary depicts a scene from the Bible.  Just as a painter might have used oil on a canvas, the stained-glass craftsman has painted a picture in glass with a Romantic realism characteristic of 19th Century art.  These memorial windows add a dimension of their own to the church's interior.  During construction of the church, each window was crafted and assembled in its entirety in the street on Emory Place by the Von Gerichten Art Glass Company of Columbus, Ohio.  The average cost of each memorial window was $235.  The total cost for all sixty-one stained glass windows in the church was $2,900.

The sanctuary was originally lit by bare incandescent bulbs wired along the ceiling beams.  Teardrop fixtures were installed in the 1930s, and in 1990 new Gothic-style lighting was selected to replace the Art Deco fixtures.

The original pipe organ was a Hook & Hastings tubular-pneumatic that was replaced in 1955 by a 15-rank Moehler organ.  In September 1989, the Berghaus Organ Company of Chicago was commissioned to build a 34-stop, 45-rank, 3-manual organ with casework to complement the existing architecture.  When installed in the summer of 1991, the new pipe organ with a state-of-the-art magnetic slider chest will rank among the top concert instruments in Knoxville.

On April 4, 1985, St. John's was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, a list of properties significant in American history, architecture, archaeology, and culture, that deserve to be preserved as part of the nation's cultural heritage.  St. John's Lutheran Church has been recognized as an important landmark on Knoxville's near north side.