Article From Lafayette's Independent Magazine!

CROSSROADS CHURCH WORSHIP CENTER

GOLD: ARCHITECTURE

ARCHITECTS SOUTHWEST

Worship is a multi-purpose word

Evangelicals are multitaskers. Sunday services. Wednesday services. Prayer meetings. Concerts. Conferences. Designing a worship center — at 42,000 square feet no less — that serves as sanctuary, meeting hall, concert arena, café and convention center is a tall order, hence the INDesign Gold Medal for Commercial Architecture awarded to Architects Southwest for their work at Crossroads Church in Lafayette was well-deserved.

Like the INDesign Residential competition, our judges were stingy with the commercial designers, too, handing out just two Gold awards.
The modernist worship center at Crossroads is at once stately and impressive yet austere and elemental. “The objective was to create for them a building that represented their new way of thinking about religion and Christianity. And the building transcended style,” says Architects Southwest’s Steve Oubre, who adds that designing religious buildings begins with sound. “Any time you deal particularly with religious buildings acoustics are very, very important.

“Dealing with crowds and the flow of people is always complicated, and in this particular case the need to have more than one entry way into the building but still have an understandable path for people to work their way in and out of the building was important.”

	Steve Oubre

The 42,000-square-foot worship center at Crossroads Church, Oubre explains, had to meet a multitude of tasks, especially accommodating a 1,500-person congregation with flexible seating in a 9,200-square-foot space that must also readily transform into a flat floor space for other uses. The designers — five from Architects Southwest contributed to this project — also created spaces throughout the facility that, through the use of natural light and materials, magnifies the intimate, spiritual setting.

But Oubre maintains that his firm was just a conduit for the final product: “One of the centerpieces of our work is that it isn’t our work, it’s the work of our clients, and we are the vehicle that carries that work forward,” he says. “This is every bit their building; they participated in discussing their needs and their desires and we were just the medium to bring it across.” — ABiz Staff