Led by Senior Pastor Dudley Rutherford, Shepherd Church is a congregation of about 8,000 members spread out across four locations in Northern Los Angeles. The church recently celebrated the opening of a new worship center on its campus in Porter Ranch, Calif., which was designed and built by Visioneering Studios, a national design/build firm based in Irvine, Calif.
"Our greatest reward is using design to connect people to the Creator."
—ROBERT BERGMANN, Managing Principal, Visioneering Studios Architecture, Irvine, CA
The siting of the new worship center presented some design challenges: the church’s existing worship center, along with the children’s and youth spaces, as well as offices, were all at one end of the property (the east side); the parking structure and surface were at the other end (the west side); with the proposed facility situated between the two. (The property is also flanked by the Ronald Reagan Freeway on its south side, and Rinaldi Street, a major thruway, to the north.) Logistically, this suggested that parents would park their cars and walk all the way across the campus to drop their kids off before heading to the new worship space for the adult service. “There wasn’t much story, there wasn’t much place for people to connect,” explains Robert Bergmann, managing principal at Visioneering Studios Architecture.
Challenge Meets Narrative
There was, however, the potential to tell a story while guiding visitors to their activities, and to create gathering spaces to inspire community-building as well. “We asked the church about [their story], and they talked about how they served as a Red Cross evacuation center during the 2008 Angeles National Forest fires—they became a type of a lookout tower and a lighthouse,” Bergmann recounts. “This idea of the Northern Lights of L.A. [started to form]—a place to look up to, a place of refuge to run to—we were reminded of the Cities of Refuge with their torches lit up, and the avenger of blood could not get to you because you’d taken refuge in these hilltop cities.” In pursuing this idea, Bergmann explored the story of The Twelve Tribes and the meaning behind the names of the 12 sons of Israel, which formed the basis for a solution to one of the principal design challenges.
Upon closer examination of the site, Bergmann discovered that by erecting 12 fire pillars (signifying the torches of the Cities of Refuge) equally spaced between the parking lot and the children’s and youth building, he could design a meandering pathway that would lead visitors to their destinations, all the while telling them the story of The Twelve Tribes. On the way back to their cars, the opposite side of the pillars would provide information on the 12 apostles. The result: an outdoor gallery, with no fences or gates, so that church members—as well as any curious passersby from the neighboring shopping mall and restaurants—could wander onto the campus and take “this art walk of sorts.”The site is inherently windy, reminding Bergmann of another story—this time, Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, in which He teaches him, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” This inspired the design of seven landscaped art installations of reed clusters that appear to grow out of native grasses. The reeds move in the wind, and at night, the tips of the cattails are luminous. “It starts to play off this Northern Lights concept and it becomes a kind of kinetic art,” Bergmann says. Upon completion of these walks, visitors are invited to enter one of the main focal points of the new facility, a detached prayer tower that offers a 360-degree panoramic view of Porter Ranch and greater Los Angeles. Pillars Café, with its outdoor patio and fire table, encourages people to meet over coffee.
Matters of Architectural & AVL Design
Danae Dougherty, managing principal of Visioneering Studios Architecture, explains that the interior design for Shepherd Church Porter Ranch is an extension of the exterior design. A series of “porches” serve as an intermediary area between the outdoors and internal lobby—and, much like old-fashioned front porches in neighborhoods across the country, invite people to socialize. A series of concentric concrete bands that begin at the exterior entrance continue on into the lobby, drawing the two spaces together. Textured materials such as wood, concrete, some metal, and textural fabric were selected for their simplicity. “We kept the palette simple and streamlined because it helped support the overall direction of the exterior of the building, with the exterior building materials that were chosen, and the natural, organic feel of the site,” she says.
The new worship center seats 3,500, and Bergmann is frank when he states that it was designed much like an airplane hangar, with no structural elements to block sight lines between the congregation and the platform. Clark, an audio, video, lighting design and integration firm based in Atlanta, oversaw the design and installation of Shepherd Church’s new AVL technology. Their mandate: to ensure that there wouldn’t be a bad seat in the house.“Pastor Rutherford was very adamant that every single seat have the same audio and visual experience,” explains Paul Green, creative director at Clark. To achieve this, Clark integrated three large Vanguard LED walls for visual support and a Meyer Sound Leopard loudspeaker system for sound reinforcement. But long before integrating this technology, Green relays that the system design required extensive 3D modeling to ensure that technical components weren’t impeding on sight lines, and yet still performing at their optimums.
“The back row of seats are very, very close to the ceiling, so there is a big rake in the stadium seating in the back of the room. We couldn’t hang anything low in the ceiling to light the stage; we couldn’t hang the PA low because it would have been in the way of the [LED walls].” The production lighting is flush with the ceiling, which meant that to achieve the right angles for the broadcast television and online programs Shepherd Hills produces, some fixtures had to be capable of throwing light 90 feet to the stage.
While 3D modeling helps to address these design challenges, Houston Clark, president and CEO at Clark, notes that it’s important to know how to apply it well. “We have all the tools to be able to design with incredible confidence that the designs, the parameters, and the specifications we’re giving the other design team members are actually going to do what we say they’re going to do,” he says. “But what we’ve learned over time is that it’s not just the fact that you have the software––[you also need] the knowledge and experience to interpret that model correctly. There’s a big difference between being able to model something and then being able to actually get information from that model that leads to the outcome that everyone hopes for.”Another issue was with the LED walls themselves: two 19.5-foot-wide displays flank the platform, with the center display measuring 25.5 feet. “It was over 300 individual LED modules,” relays Collin Roussarie, director of engineering at Clark. And the center display needed to be mobile: “It will rise up into the air, and it will fly in and out a little bit. It was a little bit challenging, but it worked out well.” Once again, the Clark team says, thanks to its experience working with 3D modeling.
Bergmann notes that he and his firm strive to use their talents and expertise to inspire people to connect, and Shepherd Church offered he and his colleagues a prime opportunity to apply this philosophy. “Our greatest reward is using design to connect people to the Creator,” he says. “We show up on site, and without anybody knowing, we’re watching people being drawn into the campus and then, eventually, drawn into a relationship with God.”
