European Meetinghouse Prototypes
Architect: VCBO Architecture
Client: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Prototype plan series range from 11,400 gsf to 20,600 gsf
Status: Built in Germany, Italy, UK, Spain, Portugal
DESCRIPTION: As a religion that was building more square footage than Wal-Mart in 2009, the Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to grow at an unprecedented speed with needs of flexible and adaptable architecture. Creating a prototype for the European area posed several challenges due to the varied building codes and construction methods across countries. Through analysis of various precedents, working closely with European architects, and the application of best construction practices, VCBO successfully designed 10 innovative standard plan meetinghouse prototypes. This includes both a single and multi-story phased design that can be easily expanded to accomodate membership growth.
VCBO’s role included taking schematic design standard plans for the European area to a 100% level of construction documents. The motive for doing this was to reduce the amount of time and money during the design phase by local architects and engineers to site adapt the documents. A performance based specification was developed with EU standards. All MEP systems, Structural calculations, building assemblies, and architectural dimensions were calibrated for the metric system, EU construction tolerances, and standards (i.e., Architectural and discipline drafting conventions, annotations, reference symbols, etc). Space for English and translation language were provided throughout the drawings, specifications, and calculations. The projects were created with Building Information Modeling (BIM) to improve the level of coordination and clash detection between disciplines. Since the AEC industry of the European area is largely using forms of CAD drawings, the documents were also exported from Revit to AutoCAD. These measures have cut in half both the time for local design team site adaptation and project design fees.
CONTRIBUTIONS: Project manager and design leader through SD, DD, CD phases; BIM model collaboration/management; discipline coordination; material specification research; presentation drawings, diagrams, and graphics for external client/stakeholder meetings
Tetrad Architecture & Planning 