Iglesia del Espiritu Santo

• Location Maywood, Illinois
• Design 2004 - present
• Construction Projected start date - summer 2005
• Client Bishop and Trustees, Protestant Episcopal Church

The project consists of a small addition and renovations to an 1890’s church used by a growing Latino congregation in a near Chicago suburb. The addition consolidates bathrooms and office space while introducing a new handicapped-accessible route connecting the various levels of sanctuary and fellowship hall with street level. Renovations to existing buildings will improve overall aesthetics, lighting, use of space, and structural integrity.

The new addition is conceived as a plane of earth bending gently up to form a ramp anchoring a simple volume to the site, which lightly touches the existing buildings to provide access and views to and from the sanctuary and fellowship hall. While the clean, rectilinear form of the addition contrasts with the more ornate embellishments and pitched roofs of the existing church, the material palette takes cues from the old. The new wood-framed volume clad in fiber cement siding rests on a masonry foundation, an extension of the ground-plane of the old church. The west facade uses full-height translucent glazing back-lit with the deep pinks, blues, and purples of the existing color palette as a contemporary reinterpretation of stained-glass windows