Friday, 29th May, 2009
More from the archives - Part 2
One of the decisions made in the June 2004 meeting was to put things on hold for a while, take a step back and have a think about what we wanted to do. At the end of 2004 I put together a new building committee and we decided to spend some time working on the best way to consult the church. We wanted to know what people would be looking for in a new building.
To that end we gave a everyone in the church a plan of the whole site along with more detailed plans of the building itself. We asked them to draw/describe their ideal church. We got a number of responses - the most interesting being an idea for a partially underground church.
Paul, mentioned in "Digging into the archives" produced this plan. As is obvious if you've already seen the plans here, this is pretty close to what we ended up with. Paul produced a wole range of detailed drawings to go with this one.
I had a go with a 3D building programme and came up with this. Quite pretty, if I may say so myself. It wouldn't have worked out though as there would not have been enough space left over to the side of the building. You're not allowed to build right up to the edges of the site. Still, I enjoyed doing the design and messing around with the programme.
One thing that we found out between projects was that we had more leeway for building than we thought. The first project had been developed with the understanding that we were limited to where we could build, that we had to stay within a certain area.
When we started the new project and hired a new architect he said, more or less, that we might as well see how far we could push the boundary. If the planning department didn't like it they wouldn't hesitate to tell us. So we ended up with the idea of constructing a new hall behind the existing building - and it was accepted. The biggest advantage of this design is that everything is on one level. We also still have the upstairs of the old building into which we can expand at a later date.
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