The Art Chapel
The Art Chapel
The Art Chapel
The Art Chapel
The Art Chapel
The Art Chapel
Church is not unlike community theatre: Both are built on ritual, with an audience congregating around an elevated stage to bear witness. The newly renovated Art Chapel in Lincoln, Nebraska, takes that idea one step further with an exterior wall cut to roll open like a stage flat, allowing the community to gather outside and participate in what’s happening within.
Next door to the F Street Neighborhood Church, the Art Chapel occupies a 153-year-old building that was originally Lincoln’s first church. It no longer functions as a chapel, but rather as a faith-based arts event space hosting knitting groups, live music nights and arts programming. True to the ethos of adaptive re-use, the design team behind the Art Chapel project adopted a “make nothing” approach that modifies what’s existing rather than builds from scratch. Two faculty members from the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln led the more-than-five-year project, drawing on multiple cohorts of graduate students and volunteers to execute the renovation.
Their research revealed how much the church’s success depended on informal outdoor gatherings that drew in residents who felt excluded from the church because of socio-economic barriers and a distrust of institutions. Working directly with the community, the students asked how architecture could facilitate more inclusive opportunities. The answer was to keep the design approachable and free of decoration by cutting part of the existing building envelope into a sliding wall suspended on a steel track and pairing it with a wheelchair-accessible front deck. Frameless steel windows on the sides of the building highlight the simplicity of the structure. Inside the small but lofty space, mobile powered tables, bookcases that double as benches and a custom plywood cabinet wall shaped to mirror the open facade all grant event organizers the same flexibility as a theatre stage.
Team: Jason Griffiths (PLAIN Design Build) and Jeffrey Day (Actual Architecture Company)
