What Will Church Design Look Like in a Post-Pandemic World?

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Image by Saketh Garuda for Unsplash

Church.Design recently attended a virtual meeting organized by architecture firm GFF in Dallas. Stephen Pickard, principal of GFF and the visionary behind its house of worship design studio, moderated the event, which featured the pandemic design expertise of GFF's project architect, Jacquelyn Block, LEED. Chad Leveritt, licensed professional engineer and principal of Summit Consultants Inc., also in Dallas, offered expertise in the area mechanical-electricl-plumbing (MEP) for worship facilities and other associated buildings.

GFF supplies the following breakdown of their presentation, "Church Design Post COVID-19."

• Americans spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, so indoor air quality and biological containments (bacteria, viruses, dust, mites, pollen, etc.) have a large impact on the health of occupants.
• Need to make changes in facilities and processes to ensure the health, safety of occupants and help them feel comfortable attending church in person again.

COVID-19 is creating the need for a new planning and design precedent for a new way of life that includes how we work, how we learn, how we congregate, and how we worship.

Parking + sidewalks

1. Make sure everything looks fresh, clean, tidy for when people return. First impressions start in the parking lot.
2. Potentially park every other space to encourage social distancing.
3. Direct traffic on sidewalks in one direction. Consider the time in between services to allow the first service to exit the parking lot prior to the second service arriving to avoid traffic on sidewalks going in two directions.
4. In high traffic areas, sidewalk width may need to increase to accommodate two-way traffic and social distancing.
5. Position greeters outside the building to direct guests.
6. Possibly host drive-in services for people that are not comfortable coming into the building, in addition to your live streaming.

Lobby + Reception + Common Areas

1. Provide touch-free entries into the building- automatic touchless doors or doors on hold opens (if allowed by code).
2. Use all entries and exits for quick and easy ingress and egress
3. Provide hand hygiene stations to wash hands or provide hand sanitizer stations throughout the building.
4. Place safety banners reminding people how COVID-19 spreads in prominent locations.
5. Provide an area to receive deliveries that is further away from the larger building population.
6.  Add taller plexiglass protection panels at the transaction part of the welcome or reception desk to separate the receptionist from the visitor.
7. Use colored carpet squares or floor decals to remind people to distance 6’.
8. Reconfigure your furniture so seats are at least 6’ apart. Use easy to clean furniture and declutter for easy sanitizing.
9. Avoid overly complicated designs for high-touch surfaces like door handles and hand railings as these are more difficult to clean.
10. Direct walking traffic in one single direction if possible, to space people out or widen corridors to accommodate socially distanced two-way traffic.
11. Encourage people to use stairs instead of the elevator. If you have two stairs use one for up traffic and one for down traffic. Reduce the number of people allowed in the elevator at one time.
12. Use touch-free lights and temperature controls throughout buildings

Kids Spaces (entry/exit)

1. Use touch-free children’s check in (Voice Automation Control systems or by personal cell phone).
2. Stagger arrival and drop off times to limit if possible. Used colored carpet tiles or markers on the floor to space parents waiting for pickup or drop off.
3. Daycare drop-off--may need to consider having parents drop-off and pickup outside of the facility for a period of time to limit the number of people entering the building to reduce potential exposure.

Classrooms

1. Space furniture out to provide 6' of social distancing.
2. Turn desks/tables to face the same direction instead of facing each other to reduce transmission. Stagger tables and chairs in rows.
3. Use visual aids to illustrate traffic flow and appropriate social distancing.
4. Use carpet tiles or markers on the floor to designate smaller groups that are spaced out.
5. In large rooms, use portable barriers to separate the room into smaller spaces and limit the number of kids in each space.
6. Provide sanitizing stations with cleaning supplies–disinfectant wipes, phone cleaners, hand sanitizers, etc. Make sure these are properly stored and out of children’s reach.
7. Calculate the max occupancy of the room to maintain social distancing by dividing the net useble area by 36. Example: 720 sq. ft. /36 = 20 occupants.

Worship

1. Signage above each worship center door to easily identify entrances for volunteers who are giving directions.
2. Adjust the seating capacity of the Worship space to accommodate social distancing. Typically, this means to seat every other row and maintain 3 empty seats between each family unit.To increase your seating capacity, you could live stream the service into your commons or classroom spaces and/or have a parking lot service.
3. Clearly identify (bright neon round stickers) each row that will be available for seating.
4. Place offering boxes at all exits.
5. Continue to have a strong virtual service and community as some people will not feel comfortable attending in person for a while or you may be required to limit the number of attendees due to regulations.
6. Provide online registration and provide more services if necessary, to accommodate the number of people wanting to attend in person.
7. Allow more time for people to enter the worship space and to slowly exit, maintaining 6’ distance between family units. 
8. You may need to adjust your worship service times to allow the high traffic areas and worship space to be sanitized in between services.
9. We anticipate a trend towards smaller, intimate worship spaces with more square footage per person. Before COVID-19 we were seeing more churches go to multisites instead of larger venues.  

Office/Admin

1. Encourage people to declutter and keep their desks sparse, to make it easy to clean/disinfection.
2. Have a 6’ traffic routing plan to make sure traffic flows are safe. Use arrows on the floor to indicate the direction of traffic. 

Open Office Areas

1. Space desk at least 6’ apart.
2. Add an expandable cubicle guard on partitions.
3. Stagger desks so they are not facing each other
4. Add portable barriers to separate spaces into smaller zones.
5. Use different colored carpet circles at people’s workstation to designate the 6’ zone.
6. Add social distancing signage
7. Remove some chairs out of conference rooms to encourage social distancing.
8. Allow people to work at home or in other spaces in the building.
9. Can people work in the commons/lobby or in a classroom that is vacant during the week?
10. Provide conveniently located sanitization stations with cleaning supplies – disinfectant wipes, phone cleaners, etc.
11. There may be a trend away from the ‘open plan’ office layout and "desk hoteling."

Restrooms

1. Monitor number of people that are entering and exiting.
2. Provide hands-free soap dispensers, faucets, and paper towel dispensers or hand dryers in restrooms.
3. Provide the right quantity of sinks spaced out properly to maintain social distancing.
4. Public restrooms can be designed without doors if sightlines are carefully studied during design, similar to airport restrooms. If your public restrooms require doors for privacy or sound control, consider adding foot operated door openers to doors so people can open the door with their foot.
5. Provide hands-free light controls.
6. Select easy to clean and durable finishes. Non-porous, smooth surfaces like stainless steel or quartz are easier to clean and disinfect than porous surfaces like natural stone.
7. Sanitize during and after each worship experience. 

General/Service

1. Provide adequate space for janitorial cleaning supplies and make sure they are conveniently located to reduce the travel time to get supplies.

Site/Outdoor Space

1. Access to green space is important for mental and physical health. Consider providing spaces for meditation, prayer and contemplation outside.
2. Provide open space for the community to use.
3. Using outdoors is a great way to maximize your space with smaller budget. In nice weather, could you have classes outdoors? Could you have bible study outside, what other events could be hosted outside.
4. Space outdoor furniture to encourage 6’ social distancing.

MEP (Provided by Chad Leveritt, PE.  Summit Consultants Inc.)

1. Consider improving air quality and air movement in accordance with the American Society for Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) airborne infectious disease mitigation recommendations through the following means listed below. The degree to which each solution is applied would be dependent upon the facility type, potential risk and available budget.
2. Supply clean air to susceptible occupants
3. Contain contaminated air and/or exhausting to outdoors
4. Dilute the air in a space with cleaner air from outdoors and/or filtering the air
5. Clean air within the room.
6. Consider integrating UV light at major air handlers or ductwork. UV light has three wavelength categories: UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C. UV-C light is a short-wavelength, ultraviolet light that breaks apart virus DNA, leaving it unable to function or reproduce. UV-C airstream disinfection packages with lamps spaced at close intervals can provide airstream disinfection.
7. As an addition or alternative to UV-C, consider integrating bipolar Ionization filters into the air handling units or ductwork. Assembly includes a tube with two electrodes. When an Alternating Current (AC) voltage is applied to the tube electrodes, an ionization field is generated around the tube. Oppositely charged ions cause particles to attract to other particles and become bigger and heavier, by an agglomeration process. These bigger heavier particles can now be more easily captured by HVAC system filters, increasing filter efficiency. Additionally, these ions intrinsically cluster around micro-particles and thus, they surround harmful substances such as airborne mold, viruses, bacteria and allergens. Once ions are adhered, a chemical reaction occurs on the cell membrane surface, and they are transformed into OH radicals, which due to their instability, rob the harmful substance of a hydrogen atom (H). The result is that these particles are inactivated by severing the protein on cell membrane, which causes the opening of holes, thusly removing the protective protein layer of the micro-particle. 
8. Consider standalone, mobile plasma generators in denser occupied spaces. Technology is similar to bi-polar ionization where electrons, ions and radicals are generated in the filter unit. Air passes through the stand-alone unit and the bacteria and viruses are damaged or destroyed in the filter unit. These systems are being used in some Wuhan hospitals and have been proven to reduce a surrogate virus (virus with similar biophysical properties and genomic structure to SARS-COV-2) by 99%.
9. Consider higher particulate filters in HVAC systems. ASHRAE Standard 52.5 provide a standard particulate filter rating system called the Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value (MERV). MERV 9-12 filters are ideal for dust particulate, MERV 13–16 filters are ideal for airborne bacteria and MERV 17-20 filters (HEPA filters) are ideal for particles 0.3pm or smaller including airborne virus particulate. Most HVAC systems cannot handle the pressure drop of a HEPA filter but MERV 13-16 filters could potentially be leveraged when coupled with bi-polar ionization technology to help increase the size of the airborne bacteria and virus particulate so lower efficiency filters can capture this.
10. Consider adjusting building air pressure via the HVAC system. This strategy could be used to contain “dirty” areas from “clean” areas of the building by leveraging exhaust fans to increase exhaust rates or adjusting outside air dampers to increase room pressurization. Both of these solutions should be handled with care under the supervision of a qualified engineer or technician who understands the building characteristics and capacity of the systems in play. In addition to increasing room pressure, increasing conditioned outside air ventilation can improve indoor air quality by diluting “dirty” air with fresh clean air.
11. Consider adding water filtration, especially at points of use consumed by occupants who could potentially be immunocompromised. An initial water test could be conducted and then a water filtration plan is devised based on the specific contaminants that exceed a designated baseline level. The Well Building Institute provides specific guidelines on water quality for human consumption that can assist in the determination of appropriate water quality. These guidelines focus on dissolved metal content, organic pollutants, herbicides and pesticides, fertilizers, disinfectants, disinfectant byproducts and fluoride.

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