Westwood Community Church
Chanhassen, MN
Seat Count: 1,000
Project Type: New Construction
Project Completion: 2003
Architect: HGA, Minneapolis, MN
AD Scope: Acoustics, Audio, Video and
Lighting
Westwood Community Church is based in Chanhassen just outside of Minneapolis. Since its foundation in 1995, the church has surged from a weekly attendance of 90 to more than 2,500. Their new worship center not only enables more people to attend their church, but it is also built specifically to enhance the contemporary services of the church while maintaining a warm since of community in the congregation.
The shape and size of a room determines how a space sounds. At Westwood there are different architectural features that help their large worship center sound smaller and more intimate: the ceiling design, the exposed wall area and the room’s cross section.
The architects’ desire for the worship center was to create a large and “inspiring” volume. From an acoustical point of view, it is best to keep the ceiling as low as possible to reduce the room volume, make the space less reverberant and, at the same time, more intimate and supportive to the congregation.
To overcome this conflict and achieve these two goals we introduced several ceiling elements or “clouds” at 26 ft. above the finish floor. These clouds split the room volume in two and decouple the upper volume from the lower volume of the sanctuary reducing by half the volume seen and excited by the sound system. Another important function of these ceiling elements is to reflect the sound produced by the congregation quickly back to the seating area. The lower the clouds, the stronger the reflection and the shorter the time it takes for the sound to travel back to the congregation.
Apart from the ceiling, the area of wall exposed to the sound system was minimized. To accomplish this, terraced seating areas were located at the sides and rear in front of the lower portion of walls of the sanctuary hiding them from the loudspeakers. This arrangement with terraced areas was also introduced to allow people to see other people and so increase the feeling or sense of community within the room.
Entrances from the lobby were placed, intentionally, at both sides of the rear wall; visually hidden and acoustically unexposed to the sound coming from the sound system.
The ceiling slopes down at the rear of the room reducing the extent of exposed rear wall. This portion of wall is heavily covered with acoustical treatments to avoid echoes coming back to the platform.
