Top right: Tall foyer with steeply sloped roof serves as Jubilee Outreach's steeple. Above: Acoustical ceiling panels, installed at staggered depths on sanctuary walls, suggest Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. Skylight in foyer casts moving bar of sunlight on entry wall. Below: Aerial photo during construction shows strong, clear geometry of the total composition; old church at lower right. (Photo courtesy Wigodsky & Assoc.) Below right: Wigodsky used standard components exclusively for building shells and canopies.
A cultural aside: Most of the familiar Christian denominations were born in Europe centuries or millennia ago; or in a few cases in particular regions of the United States in the 19th century. Even when building new churches in the US, Catholic and mainstream Protestant congregations often favor a formal vocabulary rooted in their denomination's particular history and traditions, from a time and place of masonry-based architecture. Non-denominational churches don't carry that historical or cultural baggage. For them, the non-referential, ahistorical character of metal building systems is less an absence than a presence -- a sign of the congregation's unaffiliated status. Thus cultural as well as cost considerations may explain why so many non-denominational churches occupy pre-engineered metal buildings. They're architecturally non-denominational.
Jubilee Outreach/Wigodsky & Assoc.
Designing within the system
March 2, 2008The pre-engineered metal building is Modern architecture's unloved love child. It is everywhere to be seen in humble servitude -- sheltering the farm tractor, the city car repair shop, the suburban plumbing supply -- yet we cast our eyes away. It may be honest and hardworking, but it is not of our class. No one speaks of it in polite company.
But consider the core aesthetic values of Modern architecture -- expressed structure, no applied ornament, economy of means, functional clarity, modularity. Consider, too, the democratic and progressive cultural values that underpinned Modern architecture at its inception and gave rise to its aesthetic. Carried to their logical conclusion, those values would seem to commend pre-engineered building systems, which contain the genetic material of Modernism, to the attention of serious Modern architects. It hasn't happened -- not much, at least.
A welcome exception is Wigodsky & Associates' design for Jubilee Outreach, a non-denominational church on W.W. White Road near Southcross Boulevard on San Antonio's Southeast Side. Architect Dan Wigodsky employed stock components exclusively for the structure of this 30,000 square-foot complex, built at an astonishingly low cost of $66 per square foot.
In one sense, the project is not unusual. Non-denominational churches, which tend to have fewer resources than the congregations of established denominations, often occupy prefab metal buildings for cost reasons --- most often a single gable-front box, sometimes dressed up with stone veneer around the entry. That, Wigodsky says, was what Jubilee Outreach had in mind when it outgrew its existing building, which still stands as a multipurpose hall near the new structure.
But Wigodsky had been looking for an opportunity to take full advantage of the pre-engineered system -- to celebrate its modular, mass-production qualities rather than merely acquiesce to them or disguise them. Moreover, the site gave him a contextual reason to respect the materiality of the system: A metal shed housing an industrial facility stood almost directly across the road.
Generally, the surrounding context is low and small in scale, with s subdivision of detached single-family houses immediately to the west and low, somewhat scattered commercial buildings on W.W. White Road.
Wigodsky matched the neighborhood scale by breaking the church complex into four contiguous but structurally independent shed-roofed, color-coded buildings, corresponding to four program elements.
The signature of the complex is the foyer, nearly 58 feet tall at the top of its steeply sloping roof and 57 feet long, but only 17 feet wide. Rising high above the rest of the complex, this white-clad form serves as the church's steeple. A clear skylight in the roof, which slopes down toward the south, casts a bar of sunlight on the northern wall and functions as a kind of sundial. (Wigodsky had hoped for a slot cutting across the full width of the roof slope, but cost considerations dictated a standard bubble skylight.)
Stretching south from
the foyer is a blue-clad building for classrooms and offices flanking a
single corridor, 227 feet long, that terminates in a glazed rear entry.
This long, low, linear form parallels W.W. White Road and suits its
character. Running northward from the foyer is the green-clad sanctuary
lobby, with its glazed north wall facing a courtyard and the church's
original structure. Wigodsky used stock colors for all the exterior
shells, and all the glazed components are standard storefront systems.The 1,000-seat sanctuary is a square, 100 feet on a side. The metal exterior is a light beige suggestive of stone in color. The altar, set into one corner, is backed by reflective stained-plywood panels, but the other interior wall surfaces are clad with acoustical ceiling panels -- much less expensive than conventional fabric-covered panels designed for walls -- that were cut in varying sizes and staggered slightly in depth to mimic the look of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Steel columns on the east and west support the roof trusses, so the southern wall is an expansion face. As the congregation grows, the sanctuary can sprout a mirror image and double in size.
Pre-engineered metal components also were used for exterior canopies at the entry and to connect the new complex to the old church.
By focusing tightly on what the pre-engineered system does well -- by designing within the system without apology or regret -- Wigodsky has created a unified essay in strong, clear geometry, appropriate to its use and its community, comely in its purity and modesty.
Mike Greenberg
A little loving care transformed a former auto body shop into the Big Grass Bamboo retail oasis. Left: How the place looked before.
Big Grass Bamboo
Cinderella story
What about all those, um, legacy prefabs scattered about the landscape? When they've outlived their original industrial uses, is the scrapyard the only option? The metamorphosis of a former auto body shop into a retail oasis shows the potential of recycling in place."I passed by all the time and
edited it out of my view because it was such a dog," John Hanesworth
said of the abandoned ensemble of metal sheds that he and his wife,
Duang, eventually converted to their Big Grass Bamboo retail
store, selling indoor and outdoor furniture and patio accessories. The
site is at the corner of Hildebrand and Beacon on the near North Side.
It looked ugly, but the garage doors suited the indoor-outdoor character of the product line, and there was ample outdoor space for patio display on a highly visible corner.
They hosed the buildings down to get rid of 30 years of grime, pasinted the metal an earthy light green, powerwashed and stained the concrete interior floors, removed a sheet-metal shade structure and replaced the asphalt paving with crushed granite. (They piled up the asphalt pieces to create a little hill landscaped with giant limestone blocks, plant materials and a pond.)
Working without an architect, Hanesworth made modest alterations to the metal buildings. He lined the garage door openings with pine and affixed awnings above them. He covered the concrete ramps with a boardwalk to create usable space. He enlarged a second-floor opening and dressed it with a window frame from Thailand. He added wood-plank treads to a metal interior stairway leading to a loft, now used to display bedroom furniture. Swags of fabric and suspended bamboo screens partially obscure the exposed roof trusses. Downspouts were cut short to empty into bamboo troughs and then into giant clay rainwater-collection cisterns from Thailand -- Big Grass sells them as fast as they come in. A new metal mesh fence protects the outdoor merchandise from theft and vandalism but keeps it visible to passing motorists. A lot of them stop and buy.
It looked ugly, but the garage doors suited the indoor-outdoor character of the product line, and there was ample outdoor space for patio display on a highly visible corner.
They hosed the buildings down to get rid of 30 years of grime, pasinted the metal an earthy light green, powerwashed and stained the concrete interior floors, removed a sheet-metal shade structure and replaced the asphalt paving with crushed granite. (They piled up the asphalt pieces to create a little hill landscaped with giant limestone blocks, plant materials and a pond.)
Working without an architect, Hanesworth made modest alterations to the metal buildings. He lined the garage door openings with pine and affixed awnings above them. He covered the concrete ramps with a boardwalk to create usable space. He enlarged a second-floor opening and dressed it with a window frame from Thailand. He added wood-plank treads to a metal interior stairway leading to a loft, now used to display bedroom furniture. Swags of fabric and suspended bamboo screens partially obscure the exposed roof trusses. Downspouts were cut short to empty into bamboo troughs and then into giant clay rainwater-collection cisterns from Thailand -- Big Grass sells them as fast as they come in. A new metal mesh fence protects the outdoor merchandise from theft and vandalism but keeps it visible to passing motorists. A lot of them stop and buy.