Fairfield Jesuit
Community Center
Fairfield Jesuit
Community Center
Fairfield, CT
The design promotes the smooth function of a combined social center, religious sanctuary, and home and also optimizes the building’s environmental performance. Operable windows promote natural cross ventilation and reduce mechanical equipment loads. Large glazed panels admit winter sunlight onto dark polished concrete floors that absorb solar energy and evenly radiate its warmth throughout the building’s interiors. Natural daylight floods communal spaces, offices, and bedrooms, dramatically reducing the need for electric illumination. Recycled or renewable materials line the building’s surfaces. Our innovative exterior wall system maximizes insulation, reduces thermal conductivity and heat loss through structural members, and ensures the durability of the building envelope through condensation and moisture control. The building overhangs its foundations, protecting the root systems of the giant beech trees that surround it and shade its southerly windows during hot summer months.
Architecture’s promise of transcendence through simplicity, its promise of a rapport between a place and its inhabitants, have inspired our own work. It is this simple rapport that underpins the concept of sacred space: a space that draws its identity from its place in nature; that takes its shape when struck by the light of day and when filled with a human presence; a space that is at once private and individual, yet entirely part of a larger public experience and communion.
-- Elizabeth Gray and Alan Organschi, Letter to the Jesuits, April 2006
In addition to these time-tested practices for minimizing energy consumption, maximizing the comfort of the building’s inhabitants and enhancing their connection to the outdoors, new technologies increase the building’s performance. A garden roof above the community spaces controls and filters storm water, reduces heat loss, and increases the durability of the roof membrane beneath it. A closed-loop geothermal heating and cooling system, fed by fifteen wells beneath the parking area, provides energy to the building without fossil fuels.
Photography
Robert Benson