Building on Faith: Religious construction projects present unique challenges

The words of the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s capital projects manager made the construction project too tempting to ignore.
“He called me up and said something like, ‘Would you be interested in tackling an almost impossible project?’” said Jeff Yingling, President of Hirsch Electric.
The Cathedral of Mary our Queen on Charles Street needed to upgrade its 181 light fixtures. To complete the job, the project team would need to access and retrofit 26 enormous chandeliers that hung midway between the Italian marble floor and the 72-foot-high ceiling in the main sanctuary.
The team would have to preserve ornate,1950s light fixtures throughout the building, outfit them with modern lighting technology without altering their appearance, deliver a lighting system that was highly efficient and virtually maintenance-free, and complete the work without disrupting daily operations in a busy church.
“Early on, I realized that they were having a hard time finding anyone interested in the project, so of course I jumped at the opportunity,” Yingling said.
Construction projects for faith-based clients, it seems, are tailor-made for contractors who like unique challenges. No two projects are alike. Religious properties requiring renovation range from historic buildings with exquisite details to more recent and humble properties that were repeatedly renovated and repurposed to meet a congregation’s needs.

Projects generally are shaped by the success of a congregation’s capital campaign, require detailed communication with a client that is unfamiliar with construction, and must enable the ongoing work of the faith community. For some contractors, that makes faith-based construction fascinating, deeply satisfying and even a way to keep employees engaged.
At the Cathedral of Mary our Queen, Hirsch Electric conducted a Phase I limited retrofit of seven light fixtures (one from each area of the church) to see if a full lighting renovation was viable. Hirsch leased a specialized, skinny lift that could navigate between the pews and reach the 72-foot ceiling so that workers could remove a single, 12-foot-tall, several-hundred-pound chandelier. Hirsch brought the seven fixtures to Rambusch, a New Jersey company that specializes in church fixtures, and developed a plan to retrofit them with state-of-the-art LEDs.
“We had to keep the fixtures looking exactly the same so everything we added had to be tucked into grooves and niches. That was challenging because we were adding a lot of equipment,” Yingling said. “We were going from a standard, incandescent lightbulb and socket to an LED light engine with a big heat sink on it and an LED driver, which is about the size of a small pencil box.”
In the large fixtures, that assembly had to be repeated many times over. For example, each chandelier from the main sanctuary contains a large, central glow light, eight flood lights that point down at the pews and four that point up to illuminate the mosaic ceiling.
The test proved highly successful and the Archdiocese contracted Hirsch to retrofit the remaining 174 lights. For that second phase of the project, Hirsch will obtain lighting kits from the New Jersey company to retrofit the fixtures in place and use rolling scaffold towers and dance floors for access.

The crew, which plans to complete the project between May and September, will also have to “work around some unusual equipment,” Yingling said. “The point where the original controls for the lights was installed is actually in the body of the pipe organ. Just to turn off a light to work on it, you have to climb up a couple of steps then up a ship ladder and into the organ. I actually posted a sign that once you enter the pipe organ itself, do not touch any of these pipes. We don’t want to have to bring out an organ specialist to retune the organ because we bumped a pipe.”
At the Church of the Resurrection in Ellicott City, Lewis Contractors is nearing completion on a two-year effort to transform a 1960s, multipurpose gymnasium into a modern sanctuary. The project will also link the new sanctuary to the other two buildings on the church’s campus.
“This campus experienced construction and additions in the 1960s, the 1990s and the 2000s,” said Ellington Churchill, Vice President-Administration at Lewis. “So, we are dealing with three eras of construction methodology and, in some cases, the as-built conditions were not readily known.”
Lewis — which has worked on numerous faith-based projects in Maryland, including multiple award-winning projects — uses the construction management process to get involved in projects early, identify potential challenges, and refine construction plans to best meet the client’s goals and budget.
For the Church of the Resurrection project, that process included devising a way to dramatically reshape a gymnasium that had very few windows and a 1960s-era structural system that supported the roof on a connected series of concrete Ts.
“Doing that took a great deal of planning,” Churchill said. “We had to do structural shoring of the entire building all the way down to the lower floor before we could start to cut away at the roof and remove two of those Ts.”

In addition, the project team had to devise methods to build structures connecting the church’s three buildings. Beyond determining the best way to create foundations and structures that would meld together, the team also had to master some unconventional alignments.
“One thing you take for granted in construction is you will build something that is square. You expect everything to be true, parallel, perpendicular,” Churchill said. “But in this case, we were doing an infill where no wall is square to another wall. We are reminded with every project we do for a faith-based client that these are never cookie cutter projects.”
In Cockeysville, CAM Construction encountered similar challenges while renovating St. Joseph Parish.
Founded in the 1800s, St. Joseph’s had experiencing numerous renovations and additions over the decades and was finally overdue for a complete interior gut. The Monseigneur and many parish members were eager to replace the 1970s-style sanctuary which had dark wood, dark pews, a wood-slat ceiling and a transept that limited visibility throughout the church during services.

To create a brighter, more open interior, CAM removed the right-angle walls where the east and west transepts met the nave and replaced them with 45-degree-angle walls. Crews scaffolded the enter nave and transepts, removed the old cathedral ceiling and installed an intricate coffered ceiling system. Workers also raised several ceiling trusses to create a dome in the center of the sanctuary which would be covered with original paintings of saints. They reshored and reinforced an old wood floor with new structural supports, layers of plywood and fresh tile.
The project also presented a few surprises. Crews knew they had to remove the entire interior slab, which sloped 12 inches from the east to west sides of the church. What they didn’t know was that the heating system piping was buried directly beneath that slab, said John Speights, Vice President of CAM Construction. That discovery triggered an immediate, unexpected need to replace the building’s heating system — a change which could have delayed the project by six weeks.
Crew members contended with other surprises, including a shipment of custom tiles from Lebanon that was severely delayed in shipping out of Israel. Rather than leave a space unfinished, workers created a temporary fix with a faux tile painting.
The team’s ability to adjust to unique and sometimes surprising conditions, Speights said, ensured the project was finished on schedule and in time to host Palm Sunday services.