After a burst pipe forced parishioners out of St John’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, Vectorworks software was key to understanding the building, as François Lévy explains
In December 2022, a pipe burst in the ceiling of the Parish Hall of St John’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, causing significant damage and forcing the parishioners out of a space that enjoyed daily usage. They were faced with a decision: make repairs and restore the building to its prior condition, undertake a comprehensive remodel, or level the building and build an all-new Parish Hall on the five-acre property. The parish needed to understand the relative costs of these three approaches and weigh those against the benefits of a new or nearly new Parish Hall that could better address their current and future needs.
Our firm, François Lévy Architecture + Interiors PLLC, was engaged to help evaluate the suitability of the existing Hall, laying the preliminary groundwork to help guide future design work.
In the course of this work, we helped the parish consider both current needs and how the building could be re-imagined to meet future needs consistent with their vision for their church family and its place in the community.
Our goal was to deliver a report based on a physical investigation and documentation of the building, along with conversations with parishioners. These discussions helped identify the key functions and needs of the Parish Hall and quantify the space required to meet these goals
The Parish Hall had started as the church Sanctuary decades before and, over a series of ad hoc additions and changes, had evolved to its current state. Our team of three began by thoroughly surveying the structure, drafting an as-built plan “in situ” in Vectorworks Architect in real time as we measured, and taking extensive photographs as we went. While drawing as we measured was a slightly slower process in the short term, it helped ensure that our measurements were thorough, avoiding having to go back for another site visit to recoup a missed dimension.
We also knew that a comprehensive remodel of the building was a possibility, and we felt it was important to capture and document information in three dimensions. Later design work would be greatly assisted by having a 3D model as the basis for design. To that end, we used BIM components wherever possible for our documentation: walls, doors and windows, stairs, structural members, slabs, and roofs.
For elements requiring more careful documentation, we used Vectorworks Cloud Services’ Photos to 3D Model feature to create a faithful 3D model as a component of our overall building model.
For programming purposes, we added Space objects to the as-built model using the automatic boundary feature. Then, we developed a worksheet within Vectorworks Architect to tabulate the net floor area of the existing spaces. We intended to use this floor area to compare to the program we were simultaneously developing with the parish from our stakeholder meetings.
From those programming sessions, it became clear that, to accommodate all the functions the church community was hoping for, the current building was too small by about 2,000 gross square feet. At current construction costs, our rough estimate was that their total program would exceed their initial construction budget by nearly a factor of two.
In working with the parish, we considered how the program could either be pared down or certain spaces deferred or expanded in a later phase.
From our worksheet analysis, we discussed the following options with the parish:
- Eliminate a reception/waiting area.
- Locate the new mechanical systems in attic spaces over the east and west wings of the building.
- Relocate the columbarium to the church Sanctuary — entirely appropriate given the nature of the space — eliminating the need for a chapel space in the Parish Hall.
- Reduce the kitchen size based on realistic layouts rather than the arbitrary area given by IBC occupancy loads.
- Defer roughly 1,000 square feet of event space for a future phase.
With these and other minor measures, we were able to work down to a programmatic area equal to the current building size, with the understanding that a future expansion would be required to meet all of the parish’s event objectives. Importantly, we identified areas that would be common to both a current reuse and further expansion. The strategic goal is to make a Phase Two expansion as straightforward as possible, with minimal infrastructural changes.
Don’t miss part two — subscribe to the Vectorworks Newsroom to read François Lévy’s next article on design work for St. John’s Episcopal Church.
All images courtesy of François Lévy Architecture + Interiors PLLC.
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