A Serbian Orthodox church on Chicago’s Far Southeast Side is moving closer to landmark status, bringing added recognition to a distinctive campus built by immigrant workers in a neighborhood shaped by the steel industry. The Chicago Department of Planning and Development’s Historic Preservation Division recommended preliminary landmark status for St. Simeon Mirotočivi Serbian Orthodox Church and the adjoining Serbian Hall at 3737 E. 114th St. The Commission on Chicago Landmarks reviewed the recommendation Thursday to confirm it fit the city’s planning goals for the area. A vote on the designation could come at the commission’s next meeting. The congregation supports the proposal, landmarks officials said. Completed in 1969, the church draws on the design of the Church of the Presentation of the Mother of God at Kalenić Monastery, a Serbian church built in the early 15th century. St. Simeon’s brick construction and steel frame differ from the monastery’s stone structure, but city architectural historian Matt Crawford told the commission that the buildings share clear visual similarities despite being separated by centuries and thousands of miles. Chicago architects Pavlecic & Kovacevic and Radmilo Antonije Markovich designed the church. Its towers, arches and patterned two-tone brickwork stand out among the homes of the East Side neighborhood. The Serbian Hall, built in 1965, has a modernist design and uses brick colors that tie it to the church. Together, the buildings sit on a spacious, landscaped campus. The Serbian immigrant congregation built the complex on former swampland. Many members worked in the mills that once dominated the area, and church member Juliana Falloon, who has researched its history, told commissioners that worshippers contributed their paychecks toward construction so they could build a church in their own tradition. The reason the congregation chose a 15th-century design for a new church in the late 1960s remains unclear. Jim Pavlecic, whose late father William was the project’s lead architect, said his sister’s firm, Pavlecic Trudeau Architects, may look through its records for the original drawings and clues to the choice. The proposed designation would recognize both the buildings’ architectural character and the community effort behind them. The church’s location on the Far Southeast Side also gives the nomination particular significance in a part of Chicago more commonly associated with the collapse of the steel industry than with celebrated architecture.