April 27 meeting

The newspace@chpc task force met Monday evening with architect Kevin Milburn, who had joined us for our fall church gathering. Jane, Anita, Ted, and I shared with him some of the priorities we had established: safety, accessibility, acoustics, and greening, along with figuring out what to do with the playground and the Scout Hut.

Kevin (pictured above with Jane and below with Anita), who was donating a few hours to the church, had toured the campus for a second time, on his own, before our meeting. He had also reviewed a stack of plans that Ted had worked on with the earlier version of our task force.

Kevin had some new ideas, and we ended up discussing three types of possible changes. First, we talked about changes we might want to effect very soon, changes that wouldn’t cost too much money. These included: replacing the kitchen stove with electric stove or stoves and installing ventilation, adding carpeting, draperies, and possibly “baffles” to the Fireside Room and perhaps even the Fellowship Hall for acoustics., and installing fluorescent light bulbs wherever possible in both buildings.

Somewhat more long term and somewhat more expensive: installing a lift next to the bathroom next to the choir room, building a ramp and overhang from the exterior door near where the lift would go (and snaking around past the garbage cans towards the Education Building), filling in the mortar between the stones and bricks of the main church building (especially along the west wall), fixing the rest of the stained glass windows and installing protective glass over them, painting lines in the parking lot to increase the number of spaces and redirect traffic flow, rebuilding the playground under the trees on the other side of the parking lot, and probably demolishing the Scout Hut. (This might run like $50,000.)

Kevin – with ideas and encouragement from us – initially put most of his brain power and creativity towards a more expensive, longer term vision. This what it turned into: Build a new Fellowship Hall that would have better acoustics, be more environmentally friendly, and fit two or three times as many people where the playground and Scout Hut are now. Include church offices and a basement room for the youth. Connect it to the old Education Building and make it all accessible, all on the ground level with a new entrance onto a widened parking lot driveway. Build a modern kitchen in the Youth Room. Send that hallway all the way through into the new building. Give the new Fellowship Hall a façade of stone and bricks - all the wary around- so it would match the existing buildings. Put mainly children – the preschool, Sunday school, etc. – in the existing church office/preschool complex. Kids mostly can climb up and down the stairs and any disabled kids we could carry. Subdivide – either permanently or with dividers – the existing Fellowship Hall and leave the Fireside Room, perhaps given better acoustics. (We didn’t talk about the old kitchen.) (This might run like $800,000 or so.)

Anita is going to present some of these ideas to session Wednesday night. We’ll see where we go from there.
-- Perry