Christ Church Episcopal School - Greenville, South Carolina
By: Frances Putman
The seeds of what is now Christ Church Episcopal School in Greenville , South Carolina , were first sewn in 1949, when St. James Episcopal Church first opened its K-2 Day School. Ten years later, the Rector and Vestry of Christ Church took over the school and added grades 3 through 6. Over the years, more grades were added, all the way to 12, and a new campus was built for the upper grades. Later, the middle school moved onto the same campus. In 2002, finally, elementary students were located there as well, bringing all students together in one location.
The next step was to construct a chapel for the students to gather for weekly services, music events and assemblies. Although this facility would come in after previous construction, it was important to all involved that this be a central, focal point of the campus. It needed to reflect a return to the roots of the school and its church beginnings, something that was missing once all the classes moved away from the church facility.
"They wanted the chapel to be the center of campus, rather than just peripheral, and that's the way it is. You can't miss it when you arrive," said S. Scott Simmons, AIA, LEED AP, of Craig Gaulden Davis Architects. "Metaphorically and literally, the steeple is the center of life at the school."
As the campus had grown over more than 30 years, buildings had been added around a central courtyard or quad area. This turned out to be just the right place for the chapel, designated as The Chapel of the Good Shepherd.
"This chapel turned what was leftover space into the heart of the campus," Simmons said.
The facility was designed in an Oxford Chapel plan, adapted for use in a K-12 school, and is, as Simmons said, "traditional in function, but contemporary in architecture." The chapel, which seats 400 people, has a traditional feel, enhanced with special features, like wider aisles and risers in student seating areas. Everyone in the facility has a good seat and can see above the people in front of them. A moveable chancel adds flexibility, depending on the needs for a particular service. And that can vary at the three chapel services held each week-one each for lower, middle and upper grades-as well as other presentations sometimes held in the facility.
Stained glass windows around the chapel add a sense of tradition. In a successful fundraising effort, donors were asked to make contributions for the windows in honor or memory of loved ones. In a nod to the modern, the chapel also has full audio/visual capabilities. Large screens work well for showing videos or displaying song lyrics.
Enhancing the sense of community at the school was a major goal of this project. In addition to the ramped floors, which improve the line of sight, the facility was built in a circular format, allowing students to face each other during services.
"When students gather, they see the faces of half the people who are there," said Simmons.
Since a congregation of students differs from a traditional church family, clergy can have more relational-type services, with no raised pulpit, using wireless microphones and speaking from a simple lectern. Even if the liturgy is traditional, the atmosphere is contemporary, warm and intimate.
Although the chapel itself includes about 10,000 square feet of space, the entire project was about double that amount, with plenty of room built in for storage and later expansion. Some of the finishes, like simple stained concrete, can be easily upgraded in the future, when funds are available.
In touches of elegant simplicity, altar railings feature hammered, wrought iron fashioned by a local blacksmith. Images of wheat sheaves and grape leaves are woven as symbols of faith throughout the chapel on railings, around the arbor and on table legs. A biblical mural on a clerestory window is both a beautiful expression of faith and a teaching tool.
Though rich wood accents are found throughout the chapel, the front doors are glass, rather than oak.
"It shows this isn't a fortress," noted Simmons. "It is open for people to come in and see in.
Surrounding the glass doors is an all-brick exterior, which connects the new chapel well with the surrounding campus buildings. In fact, the effect given is that the surrounding buildings copied the chapel, rather than the other way around, and that is just how school leaders envisioned the project.
"They had the desire to do something special, to create the crowning finish to the major buildings on campus," Simmons said.
In creating the right chapel space, Simmons and others from Craig Gaulden Davis met with students, parents, teachers and alumni to get their ideas of what chapel meant to them and what key values the facility would represent. That's when it became obvious that the chapel needed to be at the center of everything at the school.
Building in the middle of campus, rather than at a location over to the side, presented more logistical challenges, especially as school went on all around. Simmons credits the project's success to the commitment of everyone involved to make it work. There were frequent meetings with the building committee, and the contractor understood from the beginning the challenges that would come up.
"Maintaining the vision throughout was important," he said.
For those considering a similar building project, he believes the project at Christ Church Episcopal School can serve as a strong model. The school started out by involving as many people as possible in the design committee, during the planning stages, to get a wide range of input on what the chapel needed to include In the building phase, however, the committee was reduced to a few select members with special skills or knowledge of the building process who were charged with making day-to-day decisions. This streamlined the building process and helped the project move along more smoothly.
Craig Gaulden Davis Architects, www.cgdarch.com , located in Greenville, South Carolina, is a firm focused on architecture, planning and interior design for education, government, religion and the arts.
Fast Facts
School: Christ Church Episcopal School
Location: Greenville , South Carolina
Student Body: 1,000
Grades Served: K-12
Project Goal: Create a new chapel/auditorium space on this existing campus
Size: 20,000 square feet
Cost: $2.3 million, plus site development costs
Challenge: The new chapel is located in the very center of the campus. Classes went on all around the construction site each day, and work had to wrap up each afternoon to make way for carpool lines.
Solution: A plan was in place to account for these challenges. The contractor was dedicated to the job and worked around the school's schedule to complete the building phase in 16 months.
