St. Joan of Arc Parish Center
San Ramon, California
The Parish Center (22,000 sq.ft.) incorporates spaces serving the congregation and surrounding community. These include a full-size gymnasium, a large multi-purpose room, commercial kitchen, classrooms, pastoral offices, a religious/educational library, staff lounge and conference rooms.
The Parish Center represents the Second Phase com-ponent of a Master Plan developed by Aaron Green Associates. It stands adjacent to the Main Church for St. Joan of Arc, completed earlier by this firm.
The architectural character is simple and dignified, visually in harmony with its existing residential surroundings as well as the original Main Church.
The design successfully minimized the bulkiness of the gymnasium, typically a massive, boxlike building, which otherwise would have over-powered and over-shadowed the existing church as well as the adjacent residential neighborhood. This was accomplished by a combination of a folding pitched roof form configuration, which shears down at the outside corners, and by siting, which recesses a portion of the building into the existing slope. A large single story multi-purpose room stretches across the front of the gymnasium structure, creating stepped down massing the further assists in reducing the impact of so dominant a structure.
Designed by Aaron G. Green, FAIA. My role and responsibilities: produce Construction Documents along with the Project Manager.
