Christ Church Santa Fe

New Church Campus Serves as Community and Learning Center

Christ Church Santa Fe is a community center, library, chapel, auditorium, and school for a growing Presbyterian congregation of 500 people. Our firm collaborated with Jay Bush Design to program, design, and oversee construction of over 20,000 square feet of additions to the existing 11,000 square foot sanctuary which transformed the property into a campus while allowing the Church to operate with minimal disruptions.

A new 90-seat chapel, a 150-seat auditorium, eight classrooms—including two loft-style youth rooms—a commercial kitchen, a library, and new offices for the parish staff provide beautiful light filled spaces to worship and gather. We also reworked the pedestrian circulation throughout the complex, most notably by adding a large new atrium lobby that provides a central entry and orientation point and flexible event space with views of the extraordinary northern New Mexico mountains and sky.

The redesigned campus remedied problems with overcrowding and incompatible building uses located next to each other; the reconfigurations improve comfort, day lighting, energy efficiency and usability for the congregation. We successfully resolved a central challenge of the expansion—how a full church campus fits into a residential neighborhood—by designing the additions within the scale of the surrounding context.