St Joseph the Worker

di loretoARCHITECTURE

St. Joseph the Worker Gallery | Story

The Church of St. Joseph the Worker is, un-ironically, one of the most overworked parishes in the city. It is booming. The congregation has grown to such an extent that at Sunday Masses the 1957 sanctuary is standing-room-only out into the narthex. Closed circuit TVs must beam the service to crowded rooms in the church basement and school. The kitchen and hall are buried in the basement meaning that during the monthly spaghetti dinner (or one of the many events of like ilk) separate meals must be rewarmed upstairs for those unable to make it down. St. Joseph also happens to be in the most impoverished neighborhood in Oregon.

So our challenge was straightforward: find a solution to St. Joseph’s clear and present need within an extreme budget. First, though we were hired to design a new church, we recommended solutions through renovation and addition. We’ve bookended the simple sanctuary of four walls and ten-foot ceilings with rectangular additions, doubling the room; and by fitting radius seating into the new nave we’ll boost capacity by fifty percent. We’ve remade the building’s external form by adding dynamic, sloping ceilings that rise to clerestory light scoops bringing natural light into the nave and chapel while introducing a sense of loft to the church’s internal intimacy. We’ll bring the social hall and kitchen out of the basement and into the adjoining southern structure to renew the relationship between worship and gathering spaces and the narthex will now sit between those spaces welcoming the community to both.

Behind all the highbrow ideology that is modern design you find the fundamental duty of an architect: to serve a community. We are grateful for the projects that renew that duty and enable us to fulfill the unique civic responsibility that is architecture.

status

Complete

client

St. Joseph the Worker Church

location

Portland, Oregon

budget

Undisclosed

size

8,500 sf

team

Chris DiLoreto