The National Youth Administration (NYA), with Lyndon B. Johnson as director, provided funds for campus improvements at the then-called College of Industrial Arts, which included a chapel. Basic construction techniques were employed so that the chapel could be built by student labor as on-the-job training. Students also crafted the stained glass windows, carved the benches, and fabricated metal light fixtures for the chapel under the guidance of associate professor Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle, who had studied with László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus. The chapel brought national recognition to the young architects. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at the 1939 dedication to showcase the work of the NYA.
The chapel is 90 x 42 feet in area and 30 feet high. It achieves a sense of serene loftiness through its structure of four parabolic arches formed in Bridgeport, Texas brick with a poured concrete core, a technique Ford used again during his career. Exterior walls are gray Bridgeport fieldstone quarried and split by Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers, plastered on the interior, with redwood decking exposed under the copper roof. In a 1932 article in Southwest Review, Ford acknowledged his interest in parabolic arches, an industrial form that had been used in French dirigible hangers. Structural simplicity, use of local materials, and an emphasis on handcrafts combine to create the strong sense of place that was the hallmark of Ford’s architecture. The Little Chapel, together with Louis I. Kahn’s Kimbell Museum (FW33), are among the finest works of architecture in Texas.