Mixed-Use Campuses
A Balance of Efficiency and Inspiration

by Martin Ball, AIA 

An effective mixed-use campus finds balance between efficiency and inspiration. When conceptualizing one, some factors are purely functional and mundane; others are intangible and hard to wrap your mind around. All, however, are critical.

Who should determine your congregation’s needs?

Members of the congregation — from all walks of life — are important when identifying these needs. They include church staff, professionals (attorneys, engineers, builders, and financial wizards), families, singles and elders. Each will bring different functional and conceptual concerns to the table.

What questions should be asked?

The goal of master planning a campus is a shared vision for the church community. A good way to start is by gathering information from the community as a whole by asking distinct groups within the congregation for their input. It’s the job of the building committee and design professionals refine this information into a master plan program. The master plan program is the key tool to conceptualizing the built form for your mixed-use campus. It will include a list of spaces to house the church calendar’s activities; a list of necessities within each space; and a list of ideals, concepts or goals that will determine how the spaces are linked together.

What are the functional needs of your church?

The program should include the functional realities of listing each activity on the church calendar and compare these activities to the daily, weekly, monthly and annual calendar. This creates efficiencies in your master plan by identifying opportunities for suitable, non-conflicting activities to share space. An example of non-conflicting activities is the bride’s room and bathroom, shared with the cry room and changing room. Both are rooms from which a view of the sanctuary and a restroom is desirable. Plus, these functions typically don’t overlap during the church calendar.

Another functional reality to consider is how pedestrian traffic can co-exist safely with automobile traffic on the site. On a smaller scale, the functional relationship of moving from space to space within the buildings, and from one church activity to the next, should inform locations for stairs, elevators, restrooms, coffee stations, kitchen and many other shared utilities.

Finally, major considerations are designing for the actual condition with regard to seating capacity, and for the actual condition of growth over time on the church campus. Local ordinances will provide standards for seating and automobile capacity. These should be bolstered with information of the actual use of facilities.

For example, local ordinances might recommend one parking space for every four or five people in the congregation. If, however, you really need one parking space for every two or three people in the congregation — like most churches — you need to plan accordingly.

What values should your campus reflect?

Functional realities will guide the space programming for your campus, but conceptual ideas will help you put the spaces together. Issues of accessibility, way-finding, safety and security will help organize the pieces.

Accessibility within a new campus or church facility is a given for any design professional today. Your church’s goal should be to gracefully, yet efficiently, integrate accessible features into your new campus. This tells your design professional that access to the raised platform of a sanctuary should be and open a natural path rather than a circuitous or concealed feature. It also indicates that elevators (where required) should be located centrally so that the first and last phases of construction can make use of the same facilities.

In this way, you create efficiencies in the way spaces and uses are linked together. Creating a common center of activity — indoor or outdoor — provides a space for natural interaction and a feeling of community. This can take the form of a central outdoor courtyard in sunny climates, or a large or winding space with a hospitality counter or welcome center where it’s colder.

Finding examples of inviting or appealing campus features will help you explain to your design professional what you consider important. Each member of the congregation brings to the table a mental image of the ideal church. Help make this a reality by bringing to the table a picture of the ideal church. This helps visually convey what’s important to you. Lay out your ideas as a group, and never look back.

What’s the role of your design professional?

Your design professional will help synthesize the functional and conceptual design criteria into a comprehensive plan of action. He or she will assign area requirements to each space in the list of spaces and functional needs, organize the spaces into logical building types, and then categorize them according to needed adjacent functions.

Together, you and the design team will create a space program listing of their findings, and a diagram to illustrate how adjacent functions should be organized. Logical pieces of the mixed-use campus can be divided into building phases. Given this effort, a conceptual campus plan and building character study can be undertaken by overlaying your congregation’s collective picture of an ideal church campus with local zoning and building codes.

The result of the design professional’s synthesis of your congregation’s criteria and local ordinances is the conceptual master plan. This is then communicated to your building committee and to your congregation in the form of diagrams, site plans, conceptual floor plans and building massing studies using 3D modeling with wood and cardboard, or with computer-aided design. In this way, the information gathered from your congregation and filtered through your design committee can be interpreted by your design professional and presented back to your congregation in the form of a logical and comprehensive plan of action.

A good conceptual master plan for your mixed-use campus will balance the mundane functions and inspired ideals of your church.

Conceptualizing a mixed-use campus requires a listing of the functional needs of your church, and an analysis of functions that might share space. A good conceptual plan must also include ideas that will stitch the campus together.

Efficiencies might be found both in the number and kinds of spaces to build, and in the manner in which those spaces link together. It’s easy to get lost in the functional and mundane aspects of putting together a mixed-use campus. Engage a design professional to help organize and interpret the information you gather. Your building professionals will help you communicate to your congregation what has been discovered, and how your mixed use campus can take form.

Your church is a place of inspiration, of sanctuary, of service and of teaching within your congregation and community. Each phase of its construction should reflect your efforts to plan and identify efficiencies of use, and should honor your congregation’s purposes and ideals.

Martin Ball is a project architect for CCBG Architects, with offices in Phoenix and San Diego, specializing in planning and designing religious campuses with an emphasis on worship spaces. For details, log on to www.ccbg-arch.com or contact Ball directly at mball@ccbg-arch.com.