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When A Church Doesn't Look Like A Church
The first specification from Keystone Community Church was probably not what
architect Mike Corby was expecting:
“
Don’t make it like a church.”
When moving from rented facilities to its first owned-and-occupied building,
Pastor Gene DeJong and his 1,600-person congregation were not interested in
steeples, narthexes and other staples of traditional churches. They wanted,
rather, to
reach out to an unchurched population that would be suspicious of religious
symbols, but interested in something that seemed fresh and relevant to their
lives. The
facility opened in 2004 and today hosts six services each weekend, with total
attendance expected to top 1,600 per week by the end of 2007.
Corby, of Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Integrated Architecture, was the project
principal and lead designer on the Keystone project. He started the project
with some clear marching orders from a church leadership team that, while not
architects
or engineers, knew what they wanted.
The church’s preference, DeJong said, was to look more like a night
club or a civic center.
And Keystone was interested in something else: LEED-certification. The designation
of the U.S. Green Building Council, which stands for Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design, is an increasingly important measurement of a structure’s
energy-efficiency and overall environmental friendliness.
For DeJong and his leadership team, the LEED priority would not only appeal
to a modern constituency, but also be consistent with the church’s biblical
doctrine.
“
It’s a matter of stewardship,” DeJong said. “It’s our
sense that we’ve been given an incredible gift, and it’s the planet
we live on, and somewhere soon we have to honor that gift because it’s
not a give that will keep giving if we keep trashing it – so we are challenging
each other to be good to each other with the gifts that God has given us.”
Integrated Architecture was the only contender for the job that had no church
photos in its portfolio. That helped IA win the job.
“
We didn’t portray ourselves, nor could we, as church architects,” Corby
said. “We looked at some preliminary work that was done through the committee
that they had formed internally, and we quickly saw that they weren’t
doing what I would call a typical church, at least in terms of what was going
to be
the ultimate environment.”
DeJong said he wanted to avoid a designer who would start with a preconceived
notion of what a church should look like.
“
That was a piece of why we picked them, because we were concerned about the stereotype
of the design – of what a church was supposed to be,” DeJong said.
Located on a 35-acre site in Ada, Michigan, the church includes a 6,000-square-foot
auditorium, coffee shop, offices, child care center, teen area and a full,
restaurant-equivalent kitchen. Its seating capacity is 500 and its parking
lot capacity is 178, with
room for expansion.
Some elements of the project that earned Keystone LEED certification include:
• Two structure-high window sets and various skylights providing natural
light to the church auditorium and other parts of the building
• Landscaping that features vegetation native to the area, requiring almost
no water
•
Two retention ponds – one to filter silt from storm water and the other
to retain the water
• A hot-water-driven supplemental heating system that traverses structure-high
windows in the lobby area, both heating the lobby and also doubling as a snow-melt
system
• Electrical outlets configured to recharge hybrid/electric cars
• Rooftop energy recovery units
• Energy-monitoring mechanisms designed to alert users to inefficient energy
use
• Water-free urinals.
While Integrated Architecture does not have an extensive list of church projects
in its portfolio, the firm has a great deal of experience with LEED projects,
and Colby is an accredited LEED professional. He said he used his experience
from other projects to recognize quickly the best approach to achieve
LEED certification for Keystone.
“
Philosophically, you’ve got to start with the simplest products and enhance
those products to become more efficient, versus taking the path to a more sophisticated
system,” Corby said. “My experience has been the manufacturers
put a lot of research dollars into the products they sell the most. Therefore,
a
lot of the standard rooftop products have been designed to be very energy-efficient,
or quickly energy-efficient with some adaptations.”
Corby’s team opted for a conventional heating-and-cooling system, but
added the rooftop energy recovery unit and configured the system to maximize
efficiency.
“
The monitoring system is an important thing,” Corby said. “It may
not directly save energy, but it helps you understand how the unit is working,
how efficient it is and if you need to do some things that start to alert you
to the fact that something’s not right. It allows us to add some zonal
control in certain areas. For instance, the three extreme zones in the northeast
side of the building are all serviced off one rooftop unit, so if one room is
being used and the other two are not, there are controls in each of the rooms
that can direct more air to one of the rooms, so that if they’re not
all being used in a consistent way, it allows that one room to be able to control
that environment.”
Otherwise, Corby said, the unoccupied rooms would be using far too much
energy.
The rooftop energy recovery unit captures exhausted energy and reuses
it to heat fresh air coming into the building.
“
It lowers the amount of energy you need to heat the air,” said Ken Bailey,
project manager for general contractor Rockford Construction. “It allows
you to pick up the fresh air that’s required for a big space like
the auditorium.”
Supplementing the traditional HVAC system is an in-floor heating system
that also extends halfway up the outside windows, using hot water both
inside
the building, where it mainly heats the lobby area, and outside, where
it melts
snow in winter.
“
We have a bar of radiant heat halfway up the glass,” Bailey said. “That
allows this area to feel warm in colder temperatures. That’s hot
water heat. The hot water piping powers that, and the boiler itself will
service
the in-floor heat, the snow-melt system and the radiant heat for the
glass.”
DeJong said the church may be spending the same on energy as it would
without a LEED-certified system, but that is because the more efficient
system
allows the church to keep the building available more days of the week
for community
groups to use its facilities – a key element of the church’s
outreach strategy.
“
Our electric bills were budgeted at a number that assumed we would frequently
close the facility and we would not cool it,” DeJong said. “But we’ve
been able to keep it on seven days a week at budgeted numbers. So maybe we haven’t
saved a ton, but we’ve increased functional use and the scope of use. We
have Weight Watchers, drivers’ training, support groups, community
action groups and local Red Cross groups that use the building all the
time.”
Without the efficiency of the LEED-certified system, DeJong said Keystone
would have had to turn those groups away because it could not afford
to heat and
cool the building.
Choice of materials was also a crucial part of Corby’s lead strategy – including
poured concrete floors, aggregate pre-cast walls and Hardy Plank siding.
Bailey was responsible for confirming that all the materials used for
the building
were low-VOC, which was worth considerable points on the LEED scale.
“
We used durable materials, but also materials that, as much as possible, supported
recycled-type products or things made with recycled elements,” Corby said. “The
pre-cast panels are panels that we developed years ago when we were doing
our first LEED project with one of the local concentrate pre-cast suppliers.
It
has fly ash in it, and that has high recycled content. The main auditorium
space
is wrapped in those panels.”
The pre-cast panels can also be detached and reused in the event of a
future expansion.
Such expansion is very possible, DeJong said, if the community gets the
message Keystone intended to send with the character of the building’s
design.
“
It’s not like a war cry,” DeJong said. “You would never come
here and say, ‘Oh, that’s a tree-hugger group.’ As a matter
of fact, we have more SUVs in the parking lot than you should, and yet, as a
leadership community, we said we will constantly strive for healthier environmental
lifestyles, and the church will lead the way. So rather than have our constituents
say, ‘Hey, we drive an
SUV, don’t mess with that LEED stuff,’ we say, we’re going
to do better with the business here than we do with our cars. There are some
key leaders – and I am one – for whom this is extremely important.”
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