By Thea Jarvis

Etched in two clerestory windows in the newly-restored Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is an obscure but sensitive tribute to the memory of Francis Palmer Smith by stained glass artisan Robert Pinart.

Smith had translated the French classic, “Mediaeval Stained Glass” by Viollet-le-Duc into English in 1942, vastly enriching the store of knowledge available to American stained glass workers. In his time, Francis Smith, who headed the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech, had worked with Atlanta architectural lion Walter Downing, the designer of Sacred Heart Church, who himself had studied under William Parkins, the designer of the Shrine Church of the Immaculate Conception.

Now, some 40 years later, Francis Smith’s son, Henry Howard, is to be found following closely in his father’s footsteps, serving as chief architect in the mammoth job of restoring the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to its former glory.

It has been “one of the most important and meaningful experiences” Smith has had, though he admits, in his downtown Atlanta office overlooking busy Ponce de Leon Avenue, the job has been a significant challenge.

“It’s like a weight around your neck all the time,” he said, referring to the pressures involved in preserving the city’s oldest standing structure. “You try not to think about it.”

The seasoned architect and native Atlantan was a natural for the I.C. restoration. His feeling for such work had previously won him the architect’s dream of overseeing restoration activities at the Hermitage in Tennessee, a project that took Smith four years to complete. Moreover, approximately 60 percent of his commissions through the years have involved church building, restoration and addition.

Smith was called in to the Shrine project when contractors and structural engineers were already on board and the archdiocese had begun making plans. He was, he now reflects modestly, “a necessary evil,” coordinating and facilitating the overall game plan to insure historical authenticity and architectural stability. The restoration was, in essence, a “design-built project,” Smith said, explaining that this meant “you design as you go along.”

Initially, the challenge involved making the church a usable structure once again, seeing to the reconstruction of the slate roof which had been so devastated by the 1982 fire.

The roof line over the church’s side aisle had been heightened over time for practical reasons: when the roof leaked a new one was merely installed above it. The restored roofing has now been returned to its original height and, at Henry Smith’s suggestion, includes a metal ridge cap over the nave or main aisle to protect it from the ravages of time and weather. In addition, steel roof trusses have replaced the former wooden ones, providing greater strength and allowing support for the newly introduced cooling equipment now situated in the roof space.

In this instance, as in so much of the restoration process, there was a marriage of past and present as historical accuracy was honored and contemporary functionality was accommodated.

To accomplish this, Henry Smith and his team pored over photographs and written descriptions of the original structure, though these were scarce.

“In the final analysis there were only three photos we could go back to that were original,” Smith said, remarking that much of the research amounted to “architectural detective work” on his part.

The original ceiling, he learned, had been made of plaster, with frescoes or oil paintings of the twelve apostles adorning it. Because the church’s leaking roof sometimes caused chunks of plaster to loosen and threaten the heads of devout parishioners, it had been replaced with a metal ceiling of Georgian design that was intact at the time of the fire. Smith advised a return to what he calls the “pseudo-English-Gothic design” of the original, and the restored arrangement includes a plaster ceiling with murals of the apostles pained on canvas by Henry Barnes, a Georgia artist.

The question Smith found himself facing through much of the work was, “How was it before and how should it be now?” In some cases, preserving the original design interfered with practical considerations and historical authenticity had to be sacrificed.

Although the Shrine, at its beginnings, had been lighted by gas, and this would have been “nice to do,” Henry Smith says, the decision had been made to replace chandeliers lost in the fire and install speakers for the public address system within the new fixtures. The chandeliers, however, proved to be over-budget, and Smith was left with the problem of finding a fixture that could accommodate a small speaker and still be an affordable budget item.

The problem was solved by the chance visit of an Arkansas designer who had stopped by the architect’s office displaying a custom-made light fixture. The man translated Smith’s needs into an attractive hanging lantern that lights the Shrine’s interior and hides the public address speakers as well.

Another major decision involving history vs. practicality revolved around the structure’s masonry. In this case, a happy union was struck, though many will not recognize it as such.

At some point in its history, the Shrine’s brick had been carefully painted over. As years went by, other voices called for removal of the paint. A process which required extensive sandblasting. The surface of the building was badly fractured with all the work, and when the church’s joints were repaired to stabilize the structure, the edges of the bricks were likewise impaired. The result was a space of one inch rather than the usual three-eighths of an inch filled with a light-hued mortar that separated the bricks one from the other. I.C. regulars became accustomed to the outside appearance and presumed it to be the original design.

To diminish the visual impact of the over-wide joints after the fire, Henry Smith suggested reworking the brick in a dark red mortar. The final satisfactory result came only after he had tried some 10 different color mixes on the side of the building.

What he discovered in his research, however, was that the Shrine’s original mortar had the same red base. The new mortar actually helps to give the church the exterior appearance it originally had.

For Henry Howard Smith, who will remain on the job until the restoration is complete, now is the time of winding down. The nights of grappling with the heady problems of preservation and the days of carrying the weight of the city’s oldest extant building on his shoulders are fairly well over.

But looking back on the restoration that has been his number one priority over the past two years, Henry Smith feels the effort has been worthwhile.

The Atlanta Urban Design Commission recently cited the Shrine restoration as one of the 10 outstanding works of historic preservation of 1984 and, though he personally makes no claim to the award, Smith has played a major part in the achievement.

“As I see the church nearing completion I have some satisfaction that we helped preserve some of the history of the church and the city,” Henry Howard Smith says simply.

His father would have been proud.