Religious construction spending is running 24.7 percent ahead of last year while the rest of the market contracts, and the median American congregation now gathers about 70 adults. Those two facts together explain why the worship rooms being drawn today are sized differently than the ones built twenty years ago, and why the programming question has shifted from seat count to hours of use.
Most owners arrive at an architect with the answer already chosen. Before a committee commits several million dollars to new construction, somebody has to be willing to test whether more square footage is the fix. Here is what an honest assessment looks at, and why a firm that will tell you not to build is one you can believe when it tells you to build.
Most building projects begin with a square footage guess, and that guess is where budgets quietly come apart. Here is how the programming phase defines what you are actually building, and why it sets the budget long before anyone draws a line.
