‘Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’: Craftsmen design chapel to last centuries

Home Features ‘Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’: Craftsmen design chapel to last centuries
‘Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’: Craftsmen design chapel to last centuries
Workers install the coffered plaster panels of the barrel ceiling. Grace Houghton | Collegian

The columns march down both sides of the nave, and are bare now after shedding their protective plywood cases. In the middle of a quiet Thursday afternoon, several workers are fastening a few last tiles of the coffered plaster ceiling with the help of a bucket lift, finishing another arc of dusty white panels lining the arched ceiling. Bunches of colorful electrical wires are looped on themselves at regular intervals along the ceiling, anticipating chandeliers.

Standing on the bare concrete of the choir loft 24 feet above the ground, the permanence of the structure is laid bare. The chapel is designed to last for 300 years, according to several project craftsmen. Christ Chapel has provided a unique opportunity for the craftsmen, from chief architect Duncan Stroik to stonemason and foreman Donny Lambert, to showcase their skills. New classically-designed chapels with the high-quality material and interior design of Christ Chapel are rarely built in the U.S. today, often due to lack of adequate funding. For Weigand Construction Senior Project Manager Kent Gilliom, the opportunity to collaborate on a project like Christ Chapel with the other contracted crews, including those specializing in such specific trades as limestone masonry and cast plaster ceilings, is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

 

Five-ton limestone columns and matching campus brick

 

As he and his team painstakingly welded, stacked, and mortared the chapel walls, stonemason Donny Lambert repeatedly trekked between Bloomington, Indiana, and Hillsdale “to double-check and triple-check the dimensions on the print because all these stones are hand-carved.” The massive limestone columns in the nave are cut with a lathe and each weigh approximately 10,000 pounds.

The limestone is sourced from Bybee’s Stone Company, headquartered in Bloomington, Indiana. Indiana is renowned for the quality and quantity of its limestone, and Bybee’s Stone in particular has quarried, measured, and cut stone for sections of the Pentagon reconstructed after 9/11. The peach-colored outside brick, that, line by line, wraps the cinderblock inner structure, is custom-made for Christ Chapel by Beldon Brick in Canton, Ohio, at $1.40 a piece, according to specifications from Chief Administrative Officer Richard Péwé.

The brick masonry dome and massive structural stone pillars in particular set Christ Chapel apart. According to chief architect Duncan Stroik, “you don’t see new churches in America built with interior stone columns after World War II,” and the same holds for brick domes.

Since five or 10 years may easily go by between building projects on campus, and brick color catalogues change frequently, Péwé repeatedly searches for the closest color matches possible in each college building project.

“The most important thing is that we selected something really close,” he said. “If you were to get brick that was fired in Colorado and custom pieces that were fired in Illinois, you’re going to get different colored bricks and we would not have been happy with that.”

In order to get both the desired color and the custom-shaped pieces, including the concave entrance facing Central Hall, Péwé ordered both custom and regular bricks from the same manufacturer to maintain consistency and control costs. Though Christ Chapel nearly brushes Grewcock Union and the Dow Leadership Center, the principal design reference point for the chapel was Central Hall.

“They’re not brother and sister, they’re cousins,” Péwé said of Christ Chapel and Central Hall.


The radiating brick designs on the front of the chapel facing Galloway Drive. Grace Houghton | Collegian

Concrete and essential systems

 

Christ Chapel is one of the most difficult projects Weigand has ever taken on, according to Weigand Project Superintendent Mark Shollenberger. Not only is the small size of the building site an obstacle — only 8 feet to the Dow hotel and 27 to the bookstore — but the “complexity of the details” also demands the highest attention and skill from the architects and builders, Shollenberger said.

Weigand Construction, based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, built the 70,000-square-foot Biermann Athletic Center for Hillsdale College, and the company even features the multi-use facility on its website as an example of its campus construction work. Weigand’s projects range from the 1.1 million-square-foot Parkview Regional Medical Center campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to 149,000 square feet added to Vera Bradley’s Design Center in Roanoke, Indiana.

Gilliom said Weigand took on the chapel project not only because of its relationship with the college but also because the company “likes to pursue those projects that have an impact on the community for generations to come.”

Shollenberger heads the general construction (GC) team, which includes carpenters, laborers, and concrete finishers who poured the foundations and footings for the chapel. Though the exterior work of the masons is most obvious to the passerby, Shollenberger grapples with challenges less concrete, but no less essential — incorporating modern fireproofing, plumbing, and air and heating systems into a 200-year-old design. To the right of one staircase leading to the choir loft, clusters of PVC pipes are packed into the corner of the building, and ducts are tucked into a plaster detail behind the loft.

 

Meticulous

measurements

 

The chapel isn’t simply impressive from a distance; it’s precise to a fraction of an inch. While masons typically have 3/8 inch spaces between bricks, trim, and decorative pieces, the margins for error in Christ Chapel are a 1/4 inch.

“That’s probably 5/8 inch,” Lambert said, holding his thumb against the grooves of an interior brick wall in the Dow Hotel. “I have about half of that.”

But even the dimensions of drab-looking cinder block structural frame were dead on, and those limestone columns rise with perfect quarter-inch joints between the massive drums; both are a testament to Lambert and his team’s rigorous execution of Stroik’s design.

The cornices separating the exterior walls of the chapel from the roof are decorated with hand-carved, tooth-like dental molding and tiny pineapples on the tip of each corner. The molding mirrors that are on Central Hall and other campus buildings.

Another example of successfully-executed, meticulous craftsmanship is the radiating brick designs on the side of the chapel facing Galloway Drive. “Those were fun,” Lambert smiled.

According to project architect Tom Stroka, “Duncan G. Stroik firmly believes beautiful drawings result in more beautiful buildings.” Grace Houghton | Collegian

Dozens of overtime hours

 

Since work started in March 2017 on Christ Chapel, beginning with footings and foundations, Weigand crews including carpenters, laborers, bricklayers, operators, and cement masons regularly worked overtime hours, said Weigand project superintendent Shollenberger. Because there are so many teams working on such a compact site, some teams worked second shift simply because of limited space for men, materials, and maneuvering.

Gilliom said a lot of the time spent after-hours was for preparatory work. The limestone in particular requires “a lot of brain power and logistics to get it off the pallet and to have it ready to be installed in the wall.”

Other overtime hours were a result of schedule demands. For example, “Rosema Corporation worked 10-hour days, in addition to weekends, to complete the critical ceiling framing in time for Innovative Cast to install the coffered ceiling panels. The ceiling panels are made with 70 percent post consumer recycled glass to ensure sustainability, recyclability, and mold and fire resistance. The pace of work hardly slowed down once the ceiling panels started going up. In the fall of 2018, workers from the Canada-based Innovative Cast work “10-hour days, seven days a week, only rotating two men to go home for the weekend in Canada every two weeks,” Shollenberger said in an email.

Making the designs into reality requires constant interaction between the builders and architects, with frequent consultation from specialists, to resolve unforeseen issues.

“What you do not want to do is have an architect who hands it off and says goodbye,” said project architect Tom Stroka, who works for Duncan Stroik, Architect, LLC and drafted roughly a quarter of the chapel prints as the project architect under Stroik’s supervision.

The prints not only include each tiny pencilled brick of the chapel, but measurements of every column, moulding, and joint. Lambert said he’s never worked on a project with hand-drawn prints until Christ Chapel.

“Tom is on my speed dial,” Lambert joked.

The neat initials “TS” on the corners of print after hand-drawn print in a double-wide trailer, which serves as remote office space onsite, testify to Stroka’s intimate knowledge of the building. But even after that, Stroka said “You can’t predict everything,” and that solving construction problems is “part of the team effort.”

Through shortages and setbacks, the relationship between the college and the builders has remained healthy and efficient.

“The relationship I have with Rich Péwé and Dr. Arnn — if I ever get a problem I just call them on the phone. It’s instant. I get answers. Anything we need, we got it,” Lambert said.

 

An enduring legacy

 

Though Christ Chapel is not eligible for architectural awards until it is occupied, per the conventions of the architectural community, the exceptional craftsmanship of its builders and designers is already garnering attention, and promises well for the building’s reception.

Architect Aaron Holverson, project architect for Gary W. Anderson Architects, a firm based in Rockford, Illinois that specializes in adaptive reuse and historic preservation projects, visited Christ Chapel while in Hillsdale to work on restoring the Keefer Hotel in downtown Hillsdale.

“We live in a disposable age,” Holverson said, explaining that on most campuses and even in most cities, the most expensive building in a community is “an office tower or sports facility.”

But Christ Chapel is different, Holverson observed.

“I think Christ Chapel will be one of those spaces where you step in and immediately have this feeling that the people who had this built valued what was done in this room.”