Dazzling Designs | St. Nicholas Orthodox Church

BEFORE

Photo: Marlon Blackwell (Architect)

AFTER

Photo: Timothy Hursley

    (Talk about inventive!) Welcome back to Dazzling Designs!  The St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church is a great example of a very inventive architect.  This church used to be one, big metal box, but Architect Marlon Blackwell made a church out of it!  Overtime, this church has become a "3,600-square-foot local icon" for the residents of Springdale, Arkansas, with its boxy steeple and a metal shell.  If you look carefully, you will be able to see three very symbolic colors.  A red cross, a blue window on the left, and a yellow window on the right create the colors of the Trinity.


Photo: Timothy Hursley                                                                                                                               

    The architect heard that people needed a new church, but the congregation couldn't afford it.  They found an empty metal shed that was big enough for a church but had a lot of shaping up to do.  Jonathan Boelkins, the project manager, thought about tearing the shed down but apparently, "it had structure and it had a roof, and so we thought, well, we'll see what we can do with it."  Although Springdale usually prohibits metal panels as a new building material, he wanted a chance to raise questions about architecture as a spiritual offering.  They kept everything in the building's original structure, but his team wrapped it in metal panels.


Photo: Timothy Hursley

    The meeting space is separate from the sanctuary by a movable wall, but they used the steeple to mark the interior entrance to the sanctuary.  Although domes are an important part to Orthodox churches, Blackwell decided to keep the roof flat.  Instead, he traded beer bottles with a satellite dish to skim-coat it with plaster and embed it in the ceiling.  (Unconvential but practical!)  “We can still make architecture anywhere, at any scale,” says Blackwell. “That's been one of our missions: to say, hey, architecture can happen here.”


Photo: Timothy Hursley

     “A lot of people are turning churches into metal buildings,” he says. “We turned a metal building into a church.”

>> Read more at archrecord.construction.com