Because it’s an urban site, building adequate parking space would normally be a challenge, however, Watermark addressed this through reciprocal agreements with its commercial neighbors: on Sundays, and during special events, the church has access to its neighbors’ parking, and their neighbors’ patrons may park at Watermark when necessary. “It was a little bit of a risk-they didn’t quite know what a church would look like in an eight-story office building.” Once the firm began programming the spaces, however, it proved that utilizing the existing building would, indeed, work very well. “We started studying the value, the virtues, and the stewardship of doing that and proved that you could get a lot more bang for your buck if you kept that structure and allocated program space that could go into a tower,” he explains. But Scott Hall, AIA, principal and director of design at Omniplan, recounts that it was during master planning that this decision was reversed.
Watermark’s newly purchased site housed an eight-story, 150,000-square-foot office tower that the church originally believed it would tear down in favor of building entirely new facilities from the ground up. The design of the master plan and the architecture was a collaborative effort between the church itself, the architect, and the AVL team. Thus began a three-phase design and construction effort that would produce two auditoriums, a chapel, youth and children’s facilities, a multipurpose space, numerous classrooms, and a multitude of gathering spaces. Over the course of more than 10 years, Watermark’s leadership worked with Omniplan, a local architectural firm, as well as Idibri, an Addison, Texas-based consultancy focusing on acoustics, theatrical design, and audio, video, and lighting, to bring this project to fruition. The church’s continued growth mandated the need for a permanent home, which in 2003, Watermark’s leadership found in the form of a 13-acre plot of land next to Interstate 635 in Dallas.
For their first six years together, the members of Watermark Community Church gathered first in each other’s living rooms, and then, as membership grew, in hotel ballrooms and high school auditoriums.
0 kommentar(er)
