Features: What We Build — September/October 2005

From Hoops to Hope

Houston's Compaq Center Is Renovated To House Megachurch

By Sheila Bacon

SOLID FOUNDATION Lakewood Church was founded on Mother's Day in 1959 and its first service held in a converted feed store on Houston's outskirts. The nondenominational Christian church has grown from its humble beginnings to an institution whose message today reaches a television broadcast audience of more than seven million people.

The future wasn't looking good for Houston's Compaq Center when the Houston Rockets announced in 2003 they'd be leaving their long-time home for downtown's glitzy new Toyota Center.

The aging arena-called The Summit until computer manufacturer Compaq won naming rights in 1998-mostly housed men's and women's professional basketball and hockey teams. Stuck with a noncompete clause that prevented sporting events or concerts from operating in the old facility, it seemed the venue was doomed for the wrecking ball.
Then the city of Houston and the leader of a nondenominational megachurch came up with a plan that would not only save the 30-year-old facility but also provide a home for a congregation with a weekly service attendance that averages more than 30,000. The $75-million, jock-to-flock transformation of the Compaq

Center into Lakewood Church was completed in mid-July. The overall $95-million project became the first large-scale sports arena in the country to be renovated for a completely new use.

Scoreboards were replaced with LED screens, service areas with classrooms and hardwoods with carpet, all within an unrelenting 18-month construction schedule. Still owned by the City of Houston, Lakewood Church will pay the city approximately $12 million for a 30-year lease with an option for an additional 30 years at $22.6 million.
"It's a win-win for just about everybody," says Lorrie Foreman, vice president of operations for Houston's Irvine Team, the owner's representative and the project strategist.

The Transformation Begins

Lakewood is a nondenominational, Houston-based Christian church that first opened in 1959 in an abandoned northeast Houston feed store. It was led by pastor John Osteen until 1999 when his son, Joel-who had more passion than experience-took on the leadership of the congregation shortly after his father's death.

The $75-million renovation of the Compaq Center includes a 209,000-sq-ft addition housing classrooms and a broadcast center for the burgeoning church. A curved black precast wall aesthetically joins the new and existing structures.

Since then, the church has grown nearly fivefold, requiring a move to a facility the size of the 400,000-sq-ft Compaq Center. At capacity, the renovated Lakewood Church seats 16,000 with parking for 8,000 vehicles. Its multiple weekly services are broadcast to a television audience of more than seven million people.

Transforming a house of hoops into a spiritual sanctuary involved a complete overhaul of the arena's interior. To optimize the schedule, design began just a year before groundbreaking and continued well into construction, which started before final documents were complete.

Architects moved to the site as soon as construction started, says Jared Wood, an architect with Studio Red Architects, Houston. This allowed contractors and owners immediate access to designers, who would often produce on-the-spot drawings to accommodate 11th-hour revisions.

"A lot of times we'd sketch something right there in the field and [the contractors] would build it while we watched," says Wood.

Crews retained the majority of the arena's seating but removed several rows of the seating bowl at the arena's west end. That was necessary in order to accommodate the elaborate pulpit that includes a 250-member choir, three massive LED display screens and two 30-ft waterfalls, says Robert Scardino, general superintendent with Houston's Tellepsen Builders, the project's general contractor and member of the AGC Houston chapter.

"We could think of 100 reasons why there shouldn't be waterfalls right next to the stage," says Foreman.

Two 30-ft rock waterfalls surround the pulpit, in the center. The falls include elaborate controls that can slow the water flow to a trickle or turn it off altogether during sermons.

Moisture and noise issues were two of them. To accommodate the speakers and the choir, the falls were designed with several different settings that could change the water flow from full force to a trickle or stop it all together.

The LED screen above the pulpit is 33 ft wide by 19 ft tall; the two above the waterfalls are 20 ft wide by 11 ft tall. To support the screens and the broadcast-scale lighting configurations, crews installed a three-story catwalk system directly over the stage, requiring the addition of plated roof truss members and reworking connections to carry the system's additional weight.

Sightline studies ensured that the new trusses and a modified seating scheme would still allow unobstructed views of the stage and screens.

The floor, originally flat, was sloped 9.5 ft to improve sightlines and foster a feeling of intimacy in the sanctuary, Wood says.

Approximately 15,000 sq ft of acoustical material was worked into the catwalks to help deaden reverberations and enhance sound. The hardwood floors were replaced by 50,000 sq yds of carpet and warm casework was added to further soften the space.

"Once we uncovered the cherry trim, it didn't look like an arena anymore," Foreman says. "It was easier to call it a sanctuary after that."

Lower Level Enhancements

It took a lot of work below the former arena's floor to support 40 classrooms for the congregation's young children while buffering the space from the noise of the services above.

Fifty thousand sq yds of carpet were installed inside the renovated Lakewood Church to soften the former sports venue's entertainment atmosphere.

Service corridor locker rooms, weight rooms, loading docks and back-of-house areas were replaced with a check-in lobby and classrooms that feature animated three-dimensional figures and colorful wall murals.

The underside of the lower concrete seating bowl wasn't structurally strong enough to support the sprinkler pipes, acoustical material and other back-of-house equipment without reinforcement, so crews built a grid system with column-to-column steel beams. That created an aesthetic and acoustical separation from the underside of the seating bowl and the new classrooms. It also formed a mezzanine space for storage and mechanical ductwork.

The venue's cavernous ceilings were augmented with aesthetic netting and lighting to bring a feeling of intimacy to the large open space.

"Instead of a lot of black nothingness, it brings the ceiling in a little lower and ties it in to the rest of the space," says Wood.

On the outside, architects used a number of aesthetic techniques to soften the feel of the former sports venue. Columns were added at the exterior with up-lights to break up the scale of the large building, Wood says.

Similar materials were used on an adjacent 209,000-sq-ft addition-housing classrooms and a top floor broadcasting suite-to match those on the existing structure. A curved, black precast wall was positioned between the two to bridge the gap.

Chasing the Drawings

The renovation's tight schedule required the contractor to start building before the architects' final drawings were complete. This meant crews had to be ready for multiple work-order changes-1,100 to be exact. The owner's near-daily design tweaks pushed the original price tag for construction from $57 million to $75 million, says Tellepsen's Scardino.

When the general contractor bid the job, the team quoted an October completion date. The owner's response: We'd like it by July.

Tellepsen Builders and its 88 subcontractors stepped up to the new schedule.

"We picked the subs we knew we could get the manpower out of and knew would perform," Scardino says.

An unusual practice of bringing the mechanical and electrical subcontractors on board early-even before the general contractor joined the process-also helped meet the completion date. The scale of the electrical and mechanical work prompted the owner to seek the subcontractors' expertise in the early stages. "We wanted them to do an as-built survey," says Foreman. "We needed a quick idea of what we already had there that was reusable."

The Houston office of TDIndustries, the project's mechanical subcontractor, assisted with final demolition drawings of the arena's lower level, says Michael Alaimo, TDI's senior project manager. Crews surveyed and researched the area, marking which systems would remain and which would go during the selective demolition phase.

Lakewood Church celebrated its grand opening on July 16, 2005, and followed with three full services the next day. The LED screen above the pulpit is 33 ft wide and the two screens above the waterfalls are 20 ft wide.

The arena had previously received its chilled water from the nearby Greenway Plaza business district. Construction of a new central utility plant allowed the arena to cut ties with the adjacent district and also support other new mechanical and electrical systems.

Making the transition was tricky, says Alaimo. The contractor used temporary 8-in. water lines routed across a busy street before tying in at an intersection.

Mechanical crews also were creative in their renovation of eight 30-year-old air-handling units. Typically, such units would be removed and replaced with smaller components half the size. But the units' tight location and the owner's choice to keep intact the existing carbon filtration systems forced the contractor to replace units while keeping intact the sheet metal enclosure. Crews worked within the units' shells to replace coils and fans with newer components.

The project's electrical subcontractor, Midwest Electric, Houston, installed four 4,000-amp services to power the church and the adjacent addition, says company President Matthew Cappadonna. It is comparable to systems used to power a 37-story office building, he says. Crews used flexible conduit-something Midwest Electric had never before done to this extent-to route wiring through the catwalk system. Connections there were difficult, with paths rife with 90° angles.

"There was no straight A to B path," says Cappadonna. "We had to go from A to Y to Z to F to get back to B."

Efficiency Emphasized

The Lakewood Church renovation-defined by its sheer size, unbending schedule and creative adaptive reuse-met its original completion date through tightly scheduled and efficient team meetings, Foreman says. Forty key decision-makers met weekly to discuss critical issues, then immediately got back to work.

"You can try and 'talk' some jobs done," Foreman adds. "This was not one of them."

The Lakewood Church broadcast its July 16 grand opening on two major Christian networks. Three Sunday services were celebrated the following day.