Our Saviour Lutheran Church Renovation
Information
- Size 12,000 SF
- Completion 2025
- Project Type Religious
As Our Saviour Lutheran Church nears its 100th anniversary, this renovation preserves the historic church’s character while enhancing accessibility and establishing a welcoming entry sequence, creating a renewed and celebratory front door for this Church community. The design focused on creating a beautiful, functional arrival experience by redesigning the main approach to improve drop-off areas, widening the lower entry from the parking lot, eliminating steps, and incorporating plantings. The design team replaced former plastic glazing in front of the 40’ stained glass artwork with ultra-clear glass, allowing this piece at the heart of the church to shine at night. A lacy white perforated metal cladding on the stair tower along Rainbow Boulevard also contributes to establishing the Church’s presence.
Impact + Innovation
Lighting design was critical to the project, including the stained glass, new stair tower cladding, and site lighting. Illuminating the stained glass evenly from interior and exterior for different occasions was a considerable challenge. For night-time mass, the stained glass is lit from behind by recessed linears at each horizontal mullion with spot lights mounted to the vertical mullions of the new curtain wall. Two sets of spot light tracks are mounted on the original wood roof structure and shine outwards to illuminate the stained glass when viewed from the exterior.
Process
The design team navigated adding new cladding to the Church’s brick stair tower, which was challenging due to the absence of rebar and grout in the original 1950s masonry wall, limiting its load-bearing capacity. To address this, a custom anchoring strategy secured perforated aluminum panels without overloading the structure.
A new 40’ tall curtain wall, which replaces the former plastic glazing in front of the stained glass, needed to be high performance, ultra-clear glass with minimal interruptions. To achieve this, steel columns and a beam were carefully swung into the narrow 3’ space between the exterior wall and the stained glass, accommodating the wind forces and reducing the mullion depth.
Challenging site elevations were resolved by navigating from the street to the main entry with a nearly flat approach, which previously had three steps and a ramp. Managing 5’ of elevation change between the main and lower entries, a new retaining wall provides a more generous and safe experience.
