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Catholic Church Projects | |||
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All church buildings have organic qualities because they express the life and vision of their communities. Your church can be one of your best teaching tools for this reason. Since our collective design efforts are part of a continuous stream of creativity, they can modulate only a part of the building's life. We share our process with the people who built before us and who will build after us.
A church building is like a musical instrument. The process we go through to create it only creates the instrument. The church community must learn to play the building. Each time they play, they create the music.
During the more than thirty years I've been involved with church work, I've discovered that technical knowledge and creativity have little effect on the success of a project unless they are openly used in a field of respect and trust among all of the contributors to the project; owner, architect, and contractor. This sounds like an impossible goal, but it works well if reached for. The people involved in the process are more important than the process. If good people are working together, they will create a good process.
The owner is not an individual but a group of individuals who collectively express the vision of their community and their intimate knowledge of their site and structures. They must be able to communicate their needs, desires, expections, and concepts clearly to the architect and the contractor
The architect is also not an individual, but a team of professional designers, artists and engineers. Our architectural team consists of almost forty people with years of wide experiences and shared values.
The contractor is again not one person, but actually a team of contractors chosen to work well together. The contractor's creative contributions are often unappreciated and unrewarded. The earlier the contractor joins the team, the more the owner will benefit.
Exploration, design, and construction compose the actions of the process. These actions are cyclical, not sequential. Exploration obviously feeds design but design should feed exploration, imagination, and creativity. Construction also feeds both exploration and design if the creative team of owner, architect, and contractor remains open to the opportunities which occur during construction. The exploration of ideas must operate in a field of openness so that opportunities can be recognized and acted upon. Design not only creates the new but can also reconcile conflicting demands. To do this, design should prioritize the community's visions.