The Door Church
The Door Church
SDG Architecture LLC
ARCHITECTS
SDG Architecture LLC
SIZE
25,000 sqft - 100,000 sqft
STATUS
Built
BUDGET
$1M - 5M
YEAR
2021
LOCATION
Tucson, AZ, United States
TYPE
Cultural › Religious
The Door Church has been an active community partner for many decades, service the south and west side of Tucson. But their original facility was woefully inadequate for the number of persons both attending services as well as outreach events.
The new sanctuary building we designed allows the congregation to engage in ways unavailable before.
For example, the size of the sanctuary allows for more events such as music concerts and dramas to be presented to the whole community instead of being a more selective audience.
Another example is a new coffee and snack bar in the larger lobby that is now open to the community during the week.
The enlarged and enhanced outdoor courtyard has multiple attributes for locals to engage, including an artificial grass area with shade trees, as well as a new outdoor stage for smaller concerts and events.
The building itself is designed to bring new presence to the long vacant corner of two major roads in the city. Now the new exterior lighting and landscaping have beautified the corner.
The project utilized building materials and technology in newer ways from the traditional church construction.
In order to both save construction costs as well as provide a new aesthetic from traditional churches in the area, a pre-fabricated metal building system was utilized.
One aspect was to design the needed seating arrangement around the free columns spanning limits of the structural stem while staying within pre-engineered cost limits.
The exterior siding was another method of innovation: instead of using the seamed panels in conventional ways, the exterior utilizes a geometric pattern of different colors and orientations that connect the multiple masses of the building and various windows and doors.
This visually makes the overall building warmer and better human proportioned instead of the 'warehouse' affect.
Internally, the teams of engineers, the acoustician, and audio/video consultants worked from day one to integrate the various needs of visual displays and proper speaker placement.
The primary goals was for the congregation members to experience a service where technology and architecture worked cohesively.
The congregation now have the space and technologies to expand their services and community outreach in an impactful way for themselves and the surrounding communities.
