2006 SCUP/AIA-CAE Awards

Honor Award for Excellence in New Campus Architecture

The Bigelow Chapel at The United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities with Hammel, Green and Abrahamson, Inc. from Minneapolis, Minnesota

Click to view a pdf presentation of the project.

The United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities is located on an 11-acre campus in New Brighton, Minnesota. Surprisingly, the 46-year old campus did not have a proper chapel on campus.

The 1960s master plan called for one, but an austere multipurpose room, meant to be temporary, was used for over four decades. The seminary decided to build a 5,300 square-foot chapel building with a flexible sanctuary able to accommodate seating in a variety of configurations, along with a narthex, restrooms and a small sacristy office.

The real challenge set forth by the seminary was a spiritual one. The sanctuary had to be accessible, iconographically and aesthetically, to the seminary's ecumenical community.

"The design of this project created a meaningful space for the client," said juror Martha Thorne. "It evokes emotion, a spiritual feeling," she added.

The Bigelow Chapel transformed the seminary's theological mission and the physical campus. By locating the chapel along the eastern boundary of campus, a new edge was created that mediates between the residential neighborhood and the institution.

The intimate scale of the sloping processional relates to the twostory singlefamily homes to the east, and the buff-colored precast blends seamlessly with the existing brick and precast of the campus.

The chapel separates its interior and exterior forms and a visitor may walk around the strictly geometric building and have only a glimmering as to what awaits inside. In this separation, the chapel becomes an essay on one of architecture's fundamental expressions: the creation of inner and outer realms, a concept well suited to spiritual contemplation. The inner experience of intimacy and light is expressed through sweeping curves of waferthin quilted maple. Light glows through the maple and shimmers across it. The curves are held away from the structure, creating an interstitial space of stillness, light and mystery.

The building is sited five feet lower than the main floor of the adjacent classroom and library building so the chapel is grounded in the land rather than sitting on top of it.

The space is used for daily worship service, meditation, yoga, prayer and reflection, theatrical productions, and theological education. The seminary and the greater community use the chapel for weddings, memorials and lectures, which are also revenue generators for the school.

The Daylighting Lab at the University of Minnesota College of Architecture also uses the chapel as a case study for daylighting and several graduate-level architecture students have studied the chapel's building process.

The goal for this project was simply to create a deeply spiritual and transcendent space that brings people of different religious and cultural backgrounds together in worship and prayer.

Project Team

Julie Brown
Director of Development
United Theological Seminary
of the Twin Cities
jbrown@unitedseminary.edu

Joan Soranno
Hammel, Green and Abramson, Inc.
jsoranno@hga.com