Chapel of the Holy Cross

The Chapel of the Holy Cross is built directly into a 1,000-foot red rock butte and is one of the more audacious pieces of architecture in the American Southwest. A 90-foot concrete cross forms the building's facade, rising out of the red rock with a stark elegance that manages to be both modernist and devotional at the same time.

The chapel is a Catholic house of worship and open to visitors, with a short access road off Chapel Road. The interior is small and simple, with a floor-to-ceiling window framing the view of the red rock landscape. The building was commissioned by sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude and completed in 1956. Even if you have no religious interest, the engineering of the structure — essentially a building growing out of a cliff face — is worth seeing.

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Sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude conceived the chapel after seeing the Empire State Building under construction in New York in 1932. She had a vision of a cross rising from a skyscraper and spent two decades pursuing the idea before finally embedding a 90-foot cross into a Sedona butte. The Vatican approved the design as a Roman Catholic chapel in 1956.

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