Every time I drive down Fairmount Boulevard near my home in Beachwood, Ohio, I scan the horizon for the distinct lines of the “Fairmount Temple” building. For now, it’s still standing.

The large sanctuary comes into view first with its angular tent-like facade. Then the structure stretches out along a low connecting corridor, followed by a smaller chapel at the other end, its roof lifted above a band of windows, as though an eagle about to soar. Heavy at one end and diminutive at the other, the building’s elegant asymmetry must have been astounding when it first rose up over the undeveloped field that surrounded it. 

That was nearly 75 years ago. Now the building’s age shows. And I’m bracing myself because the wrecking crew is coming. The congregation has found a new home a mile away, and the City of Beachwood purchased their property in June 2024. While a formal development agreement has not yet been signed, Communications Manager Ben Lombardi has confirmed the city’s intention to demolish the edifice and use the site for senior housing.

The plan is pragmatic, sensible and perhaps even in everyone’s best interest. Nevertheless, I feel the impending loss. Not just of this structure, but of the vision of Percival Goodman, the architect who designed the synagogue building to bring people into unmediated connection with each other and with God.

Between 1948 and 1983, Goodman designed more than 50 synagogues across the country — a soaring concrete triangle in the suburbs of Detroit, a white igloo-shaped structure in Miami, Florida, a jeweled crown of curved concrete in Highland Park, Illinois. No two looked alike, yet all grappled with the same concern: suburban migration was dissolving social networks once sustained by the rhythms of shared daily life. 

He developed this thinking most fully in “Communitas,” his popular 1947 book on cities and society, which he co-wrote with his brother, social theorist Paul Goodman. The central crisis of modern life, they argued, was due in part to the technologies of their day which were replacing direct human contact with secondhand encounters: television screens substituting for being among the crowds of a sports stadium; automobiles and highways fragmenting neighborhoods. 

The Fairmount Temple, shown under construction, was one of 50 synagogues designed by Percival Goodman, inset, between 1948 and 1983. (Cleveland Memory Project, Cleveland State University Library Special Collections; Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University)

As an architect, he envisioned........

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