[ a little bit of knowledge prior to a large project
can go a long way...and cost you less ]
The same principle applies to churches that are embarking on retrofit and new construction projects. While facilities must make careful choices on the companies they want to work with, the majority of consultants, designers and contractors out there want to do the best they possibly can for your organization. However, this requires a little effort on the part of churches before even making that first call. For this issue, Church Production Magazine asked consultants and contractors what they wished every house of worship knew before starting a new project to ensure that the end result was what everyone had in mind in the first place.
Sid Gattis, president of the Lexington, South Carolina-based contracting firm Gattis Pro Audio, Inc., emphasizes the need for a game plan. “They need to know where they want to go with things from the technical perspective, and they need to do some research, or bring someone in to help them with this research process on how to get there,” he says. “They really need to understand that the technology that is available to them today is tremendous, but it all has to work in harmony. If they don’t have an overall game plan on how all of this works together in the long run, it’s not as good as it can be. It doesn’t mean that they have to be experts, but they need to know where they can go with it and what they can do with it.”
A considerable portion of this game plan involves deciding who is responsible for what, not only during the construction process, but afterwards as well. “Presumably, it’s going to be a larger building, requiring either more staff or more volunteers,” says Aaron Downey, audio consultant at The Talaske Group, Inc. in Oak Park, Illinois. “These churches may be asking for a lot of technology, and they haven’t always given thought to how they are going to operate it, how they are going to get trained for it, and how they are going to staff it.”
These personnel must be present at the meetings with consultants and contractors, Downey advised. “It’s important to figure this out beforehand, because you need to have those people in place – or, at least, a point person in place – for the meetings to determine what we are going to build,” he says. “It’s tough to answer the right questions if they don’t have that structure in place.”
A firm grasp on the church’s budget – even if that may change during the course of the project – helps the entire process to run more smoothly. “When we first meet with a client, we will establish a programming scope of what the system will do, along with an initial budget estimate. That is nothing new, but it usually causes some sticker shock,” Downey explains. “Being able to quickly react to that to figure out what they need and don’t need. If it goes beyond their existing budget, and they can react to that in an agile way, things go more smoothly. One thing that makes church design difficult is that many times they are adjusting their budget, and adding and subtracting things right down to the last day of design. That makes the design process longer, more inefficient, and it causes the increased possibility for things to be missed or for redundancy to occur.”
Gattis underlines the importance of paying attention to acoustics. “Invariably, most of these churches are moving to a space that is three to four times the size of what they are worshiping in now,” he observes. “Most of the time, because they don’t always understand it, they bypass doing something about acoustics in these bigger spaces. It comes down to an after-the-fact problem: the space is built and everything is installed, and they have spent millions of dollars building a room that is not what they thought they were building.”
Ken Dickensheets, principal consultant at Dickensheets Design Associates in Austin, Texas, puts it this way: “The biggest problem that I see is that churches don’t understand that the reason they are constructing their building is for people to come and hear,” he says. “They always put that aspect of the design off until the last minute. That winds up costing them money, because they have to spend – even during the design – money on retrofitting the building, to make the acoustics and the sound system work because it wasn’t designed in at the beginning.”
When acoustics aren’t considered from the get-go, the technology that is integrated into the space – no matter how sophisticated it may be – won’t perform at its optimum. “We can sell them the best gear that money will buy. We can do our best at layout. However, the sound of the audio system is only as good as the sound of the room,” Gattis declares. “If the room is great, it’s going to sound great. If the room is not great, and has issues, we are going to be limited by those constraints. There are some bandaids we can implement to help things, but it won’t be like a room that was built upon an acoustic plan. When you get into a 1,200 to 1,500-seat room, it becomes a big issue.”
This requires churches to enlist the services of an acoustician – someone with the knowledge and equipment to design an environment in which audio systems can perform well. “It really involves bringing in a qualified acoustician to work with the architect to design it from the ground up,” says Gattis. “The churches that do this are building great worship spaces, and the others are learning from their mistakes.”
Theatrical lighting systems also present a number of challenges – especially if power requirements aren’t determined before the system is installed. “When churches budget for lighting systems, the one thing they don’t always consider are the electrical requirements for adding theatrical lighting,” Gattis notes. “The power requirements for theatrical lighting are serious, and it’s not something you can [easily add on to]. You can do upgrades, but it is going to cost you a lot of money. There are severe power requirements for theatrical lighting. It takes as much, or more power, to run a medium-sized lighting system in a church as it does a good-sized HVAC unit. Churches learn this too often after the fact, and they don’t plan for it.”
Thanks to the abundance of regional and national trade shows targeted specifically at churches, in combination with web sites, chat rooms, and manufacturer publications directed at houses of worship, there are a number of resources for church personnel to peruse in an effort to do their homework before meeting with the professionals that will carry the process out. The goal isn’t becoming a technology expert; however, churches must have enough knowledge of this area in order to ask the right questions.
In some cases, after doing a bit of research, churches will discover that they may not have to launch an extensive project after all. Eddy Hall, co-author of When Not to Build (with Ray Bowman, Baker Books) and senior consultant at Living Stones Associates in Goessel, Kansas, points out that sometimes it’s simply a question of making better use of the space churches already have. “When churches come to us, they are looking for some creative alternatives so that they can get the most use out of their existing building and then minimize how much they need to add. Our approach is to try to help churches avoid unnecessary building and maximize the use of their facilities.”
When construction or retrofitting is a must, churches can then turn to the professionals equipped to complete the project. “If they are hiring a consultant or a contractor, those professionals have that expertise and education already,” Downey points out. “It’s important for the churches to ask the right questions of us. That comes back to having the right people in place that have their finger on the current and future needs of their church so that we can be effective for them. My capability for a church is only as effective as what they can convey to me in terms of their needs. I can certainly make very educated guesses based on project precedents, but that’s not to say that’s exactly what their needs are going to be. They are paying me for my expertise and knowledge of the products and solutions out there; they need to be able to convey to me their needs.”
