Design a timeless worship and fellowship facility for a college town Catholic community while preserving the character of the surrounding residential neighborhood.

Our design team collaborated with St. Lawrence Catholic Center and University of Kansas representatives to establish design criteria and goals for the facility, including the need to perceptually minimize the building’s scale to integrate with its surroundings.

The completed 28,000 SF addition was designed to create an image of three separate buildings. The new facilities provide offices, conference/meeting rooms, a library, social hall, kitchen and church. The church seats 400 within a simple square plan. The roof design, a dramatic wood structure supported on 12 concrete columns, plays a major role in shaping and refining the room to provide optimum acoustics for the custom-designed tracker pipe organ. Dormers and skylights within the roof structure allow indirect natural light into the space. Wood slats control and filter indirect and direct light, creating light patterns that constantly change throughout the day.