More on the Air Conditioning

The framing around the new air conditioning ducts in the church is now complete, though its surface is still unfinished. (See “Surprises at Church.”) I was assured that the installation would be more attractive at this point, and indeed it is. Some, but not all, of the asymmetry has been eliminated. Below is a view from the nave. (Photos were taken tonight. Click on photo for a larger image.)

 

The picture below give a sense of how big the duct coming up from the undercroft is.

 

Of course, even if the new installation qualifies as not horribly ugly, one still has to ask if a project that altars the aesthetics of the church while only cooling part of the church is really worth the effort and expense.

Surprises at Church

I attended Saturday Bible Study at St. Paul’s today and found some surprises. Well, the first surprise was really no surprise at all. The late service tomorrow has been postponed from 10:45 to 11:00 because of the visit of Bishop McConnell. So, did we change our sign on the front lawn? Do you have to ask? Below is a picture from this morning of what has become our set-it-and-forget-it sign.

I did not attend church last Sunday and so did not hear the announcement that we were actually installing air conditioning in the church. This morning, I saw the results of the installation so far.

The first thing I saw was duct work visible in the undercroft. Because I just posted a picture of the newly renovated undercroft, it seems appropriate to begin with this picture. Notice the new duct work at the end of the room covering part of the rightmost air conditioning register in the bulkhead.

Here is a close-up view:

Presumably, this will be prettied up some, but the bulkhead will surely be asymmetric in the end.

The duct in the undercroft goes through the floor at the back of the nave.

This is how the back of the nave looks now:

Doing a little checking around, I can report on details of the air conditioning plan, which has not been explained to the congregation and may not be completely clear to everyone on Vestry. (Apparently, the Vestry has been presented with a number of air conditioning plans recently.)

Parishioners may be surprised to know that the new air conditioning being installed will be supplemented by the portable units we have used it the past. One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the four registers at the back of the nave cannot cool the entire church, at least as long as the air isn’t being pushed through at supersonic speeds.

I am told that the existing air conditioning at the back of the undercroft is more powerful than is necessary. It will be replaced with new equipment with even greater capacity, a smaller footprint, and greater efficiency. The upgraded equipment will be used to cool both one end of the undercroft and one end of the church.

Why are we implementing this particular air conditioning plan, which will not eliminate our use of portable units and may have other disadvantages? (More on this later.) The simple answer is money. To do the job right apparently would cost about three times the estimate suggested in the capital campaign literature. (I never thought the numbers were credible.) Apparently, however, we said we were going to air condition the church, so our leaders felt it was necessary to do so, even if it had to be done on the cheap.

Frankly, my reaction  to seeing the work being done was one of disbelief and dismay. Let me begin by stating the obvious. The new duct work is very obtrusive and, although it will be enclosed eventually, it will mar the symmetry of the undercroft and greatly alter the back of the nave. My understanding is that a new wall will be built in front of the ducts, but this will require people moving from the narthex to the nave to walk through a kind of tunnel. Furthermore, the balcony will be offset from the new rear wall, which will look odd. (One could take the opportunity to increase the size of the balcony, which would be helpful, particularly for the choir, but that would entail more expense.)

I have never been a fan of the portable air conditioning units, but, though less than ideal, they made summer worship in the church bearable, bordering on comfortable. St. Paul’s is now spending a good deal of money on what is an obviously temporary expedient likely to improve summer cooling only marginally. We will, however, have increased the incentives to sit at the back of the church, rather than at the front.

I believe it would have been wisest to admit that we do not have the money to air condition the church properly and to continue using the portable units until the job can be done right.

If money were no object, I’m not sure what would be the best plan for putting cold air into the building.  Retrofitting a building like St. Paul’s is not at all straightforward. I suspect, however, that one of the best plans might have been to run ducts along the roof trusses, thereby supplying cold air from above. One can offer aesthetic objections to such a plan, but it is commonly used in restaurants and other public buildings and often goes unnoticed.

Would ducts above the congregation be too obtrusive?

Update, 5/7/2013: I may have misunderstood just how the ducts in the nave are to be sheathed. The intention may simply be to box in the ducts, rather than create a new wall at the back of the church. (I have not actually seen any plans.) I fear that we could end up with a wall that looks like it is being parasitized by some giant fungus.

Another 1992 Picture

I discovered the photograph below hiding behind the photo I posted earlier today. It is of a principal Sunday service after lighting improvements were made in the church. For many weeks, there was scaffolding in the church, which was a particular burden for the choir. Choir members made jokes about needing miner’s lamps to read their music.

Of course, the new organ was installed only later, so there are no exposed organ pipes visible in the photo, and the choir is still singing from choir stalls running parallel to the long axis of the church. More women seem to be wearing hats than one can see in 2013. (Click on photo for larger image.)

Our Shiny New Undercroft

Going through old photographs today, I ran into the picture below. It was taken just after renovation of the undercroft had been completed, financed by the Building the Vision campaign. I had been documenting the renovation in the building with my Construction Update Bulletin Board. The photo was taken sometime in the spring of 1992. (Click on it for a larger image.)

How many people remember the old undercroft? It was very gloomy, and our shiny new undercroft was in sharp (and welcome) contrast. I find it hard to believe that Building the Vision happened more than twenty years ago.

Help Washington National Cathedral Win a $100,000 Grant (at no cost to you)

Partners in Preservation is distributing $1 million in grants to non-profit organizations in and around Washington, D.C., for preservation and restoration. Washington National Cathedral is seeking a $100,000 grant to allow safety netting inside the building to be removed. The netting was erected to protect worshipers from falling debris caused by the 2011 earthquake. You can help the cathedral win its grant by voting on the Web. Details can be found on my other Web site here. You may vote once a day through May 11.

Update, 5/15/2013: Washington National Cathedral did win the $100,000 grant. Read the announcement here.

Worship Style

Thinking Anglicans has called attention to a blog post by David Murrow. The title of the post is “Why traditional churches should stick with traditional worship.” Murrow is an Alaskan who usually worships in an Anchorage megachurch. He claims to like his church, though he offers some criticisms of megachurches generally.

Murrow’s essay is about a church offering traditional worship in his hometown of Chugiak. (For some reason, Murrow doesn’t identify the church, though I suspect it is Lutheran. He calls it St. Mark’s.) Here is his description of a typical service at the Chugiak church:

We’ve been enjoying our Sundays at St. Mark’s. The richness and rigor of the liturgy is refreshing after years of seeker-sensitive services. It’s an eight-course meal, carefully measured out for us by church fathers—confession, forgiveness, praise, instruction, communion, giving, fellowship and benediction. It’s like a spiritual multivitamin in an easy-to-swallow, hour-long pill.

Once a month, however, St. Mark’s conducts a “contemporary” service. Lacking the appropriate resources, however, it does not do it well. This is what Murrow has to say about the service:

People come to church to encounter God. A good worship service is transcendent; it helps people detach from this present world to connect with the divine. But when traditional churches try to be contemporary it usually comes across as forced, stilted or artificial. This dissonance jerks people back into the mundane world. Worshippers focus on the distraction instead of the Lord.

Murrow urges churches offering traditional services to continue doing traditional services well. He concludes his essay saying, “I firmly believe there’s still a market for traditional worship—even among the young—if it’s done in Spirit and in Truth.”

There is a message for St. Paul’s here. When I first came to St. Paul’s, our identity was very much tied to excellence in worship. In recent years, however, our traditional worship has deteriorated in many small ways, and we have flirted with more “hip” worship. As we try to be all things to all people, our identity becomes confused, and true excellence is worship becomes increasingly difficult to identify.

Read Murrow’s essay, and see what you think.

A Video on Church Architecture

Clearly, the current 8:45 service and the now retired Refuge service represent attempts to make worship more meaningful to modern Americans. Even the Saturday evening service might be said to have such an objective. I personally find none of these services attractive for regular worship. Some agree with this view; others do not. If there is a way to attract crowds of new worshipers to services at St. Paul’s, we have not found it.

I will be the first to admit that I do not know how to make worship at St. Paul’s  more “relevant” to people who do not regularly attend existing services. What moves me does not necessarily move others. Whereas I do not believe that every American Christian should be an Episcopalian, I do think there are more people out there than we sometimes realize who could happily join our church given the right circumstances.

What has me thinking about this is a video I found on Bosco Peters’ blog. Bosco is a priest in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the diocese is considering how it should rebuild its cathedral, which was largely destroyed by an earthquake two years ago. The video, which appears below, is narrated by Richard Giles, the former dean of Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral. That church made extensive architectural changes that facilitated liturgical changes. St. Paul’s, of course, has also made changes to its building, namely by modifying the chancel and building a platform extending to the crossing to accommodate a freestanding altar.

Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral made more significant architectural changes. I don’t mean to be endorsing such changes necessarily, but the video is thought-provoking. See if you don’t agree.