Sacred Spaces in Unlikely Places

Houston's Compaq Center Converting Into a House of Worship

By Rob Patterson

Photo by Eileen Schwartz

For 30 years, Houston's Compaq Center was all about Friday and Saturday nights. The 160,000-sq.-ft. arena hosted entertainment such as basketball and ice hockey, concerts, circuses and wrestling, seating up to 16,000 people.

But when the $75 million renovation and expansion is finished this summer, the space will center around Sunday mornings as the new home of Lakewood Church, the largest Christian congregation in America with about 30,000 members. Renamed the Lakewood International Center, it will house the Lakewood Church Central and serve as a hub for church services and other events. When finished, it will be the biggest Christian church building in the nation.

As part of the expansion, a 5-story, 110,000-sq.-ft. structure is being added to the eastern end of the building to house classrooms and broadcast facilities. A 26,000-sq.-ft. addition for the facility's physical plant is being built atop an adjacent food court that spans the street on the building's north side.

The project, about fifty percent complete, is converting the open, unadorned, almost blimp hanger interior of a sports arena into an intimate sanctuary that meets the atmospheric, lighting and acoustic needs of a worship service-one that will be televised worldwide. "Nobody ever thought converting a basketball arena into a church would work," said Pete Ed Garrett, senior design principal for Morris Architects of Houston. "And I showed them that it could work and it will work, and with a little bit of faith, they said, 'Yeah, let's go for it.'

"If we were to build this facility new, which is what we were looking at doing, the church would probably have needed another $60 million dollars."

Lakewood's existing 7,800-seat facility was bursting at the seams and taxing access roads and parking facilities. The church and its minister, Joel Osteen, hired Morris Architects and was looking for possible sites around the Houston area.

When the Houston Rockets basketball team moved into the new Toyota Center, also designed by Morris, the city-owned Compaq Center became available. A request for proposals was issued, and the Lakewood plan enabled it to win a 30-year lease on the building with an additional 30-year option.

The conversion offers one answer to a national trend as cities build new sports facilities and are left with still-usable arenas. For example, Los Angeles' Forum was once home to the Lakers. These days it hosts religious services, concerts and other events. The Lakewood project, however, is the first conversion of a sports arena into a house of worship.

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"It's such an innovative concept," said project manager Lorrie Foreman of the Houston-based Irvine Team, who is serving as design and construction manager for the church. "The City of Houston was very progressive to put this out as a request for proposal and see what kind of alternative uses could be found."

To make the change, a host of factors had to be reoriented: aesthetics, atmosphere, staging, acoustics and lighting. "You have a 30-year-old facility that was designed to be utilized as a certain venue," said Greg Stringer, project executive for Tellepsen Builders LC of Houston, whose specialties include sports arenas and churches. "Then you take that 30-year-old facility, and essentially without tearing it down, you retrofit it to accommodate a different venue.

"Although it is somewhat similar in the fact that you are seating a lot of people in a given area, there's a lot of difference between a sports venue and a Christian church and religious venue. We have to take things out and replace them, particularly structure." Some $60 million of the total project cost is being spent on the renovation and new construction under a guaranteed-maximum-price contract. "We're doing this at a very quick pace," Stringer said. "We will have enormous crews working to complete this on schedule."

The biggest structural change was removing some of the precast concrete seating levels at the west end of the arena and replacing them with a structural-steel-frame stage to serve as the pulpit and altar area. It will feature choir lofts for 250 people, an orchestra pit for 10 musicians that can be raised and two image-magnification screens above the stage. Waterfall features will flank the stage on either side, with an adjustable flow to control the noise level.

"We reoriented the focus from the center of the arena to the stage at the end of the building," Garrett said. On the floor where the basketball court once was, a sloped seating area rises to the bowl, adding seats to replace those lost to the stage area and keeping the capacity near 16,000.

The original building is a structural steel frame with a steel truss roof. The exterior is clad with glass and pink precast concrete. The seating decks are reinforced concrete. As an arena, it was more of an unfinished shell. To add interior warmth, the concrete floors are being carpeted and new sheetrock walls and finishes are being added.

Catwalks were added in the ceiling area to accommodate lighting and staging requirements for services and television broadcasts. "We figured that the additional load we were putting on that roof was 350,000 pounds," said Muhammad A. Cheema, principal with Houston-based engineering firm Walter P. Moore, who also served as structural engineers on the original building. "We analyzed all of the existing trusses with the new loads, and found many adequate. But others we found were not adequate." Additional members and bracing were added, and connections were reinforced.

The original open ceiling area of the arena is now being draped with netting between the catwalks creating a cloud-like feel. An adjustable-lighting system offers multiple color options to enhance performance and scriptural aspects of services.

Underneath the arena, former locker room areas are being replaced by a new interior shell that will house classrooms. Since the services above can reach sound levels of up to 112 decibels, a separation ceiling with acoustical batting is being suspended between the arena floor and the classrooms. Additional acoustic dampening is being added below the seating decks to prevent extraneous noises from intruding on the services.

A sophisticated sound system set up to account for any delay will bring Pastor Osteen's preaching to every corner of the former arena. "We are really trying to work on the intimacy and enhance and complement the worship service at the highest level," Garrett said.

The new five-story addition at the east end of the arena is a reinforced concrete structure with a precast skin similar to that of the original building. It will contain classrooms and a broadcast audio/visual studio for the church's transmissions, which are aired on several local and cable channels and seen in about 100 nations worldwide. The building is engineered to accommodate another five stories in the future to be built of structural steel.

Because the Compaq Center flooded during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, a flood wall is being built around the structure with flood gates at the entry points. The new building is set 5 ft. above grade.

The arena lobby will have a carpeted floor, new sheetrock walls and a lightweight sheetrock ceiling stair-stepped to the floor-to-ceiling windows to allow maximum natural light. "They are putting a lot of energy, effort, cost and design into changing this from what I'd call a very vanilla, exposed structural building into a warm, rich one," said Stringer said.

New precast columns are being added to the exterior of the arena, and a feature wall will cover the seams between the old structure and the new building. "The additional features outside will give it a totally different look, and make it nice drive-by architecture," Foreman said.

The Compaq Center got its HVAC feeds and electrical connections from the adjacent Greenway Plaza. But Lakewood Church will have its own mechanical system, sited atop the food-court plaza deck between the arena's north side and a parking garage across the street. "Fortunately, when they built that food court, it had the structural capacity to go two more floors," Foreman said. "They anticipated putting in offices and a practice court for the Rockets." Additional steel bracing needed to be added, and connections were reinforced to carry the load. But the foundation did not need any additional work.

One daunting aspect of the project is "a very tight site, right there on the freeway," Foreman said.

But the location, at one of the busiest intersections in the U.S., should be an advantage to Lakewood Church, the fastest growing congregation in the country.

The result could be a blessing for the church and the city of Houston. "It's a win-win situation," Garrett said. "You have an existing building with all the seats there, and compare the 30-year lease to the extra $60 million of additional construction if you were to build it new. The money that the church would have spent on bricks and mortar can be spent on their ministry."

Key Players:

Owner: Lakewood Church, Houston
Construction Manager: The Irvine Team, Houston
General Contractor: Tellepsen Builders LP, Houston
Architect: Morris Architects, Houston
Structural Engineer: Walter P. Moore, Houston
MEP Engineer: CHP&A, Houston
Earthwork & Exterior Demolition: JMG Construction, Houston
Interior Demolition: Southern Demolition, Spring
Site Utilities: Jimmerson Underground, Sugar Land; Slack & Co., Houston
Concrete: Tellepsen Concrete, Houston
Architectural Precast Concrete: Coreslab Structures, Austin
Masonry: W.W. Bartlett, Houston
Steel Erectors: Lucky Steel Erectors, Houston; International Structures, Houston
Structural Steel & Miscellaneous Metal: Regional Construction, Houston
Architectural Woodwork: CRC/Mastercraft, Houston
Glass and Glazing: Admiral Glass, Houston
Lath & Plaster: Golden West Plastering, Houston; Texas Exterior Systems, Houston
Acoustical Ceiling & Wall Panels: Clunn Acoustical, Houston
Drywall: Applied Finish Systems, Houston; Marek Brothers, Houston
Painting: R&M Services, Houston
Theater Seating: Irwin Seating, Grand Rapids, Mich.
Elevators & Escalators: Schindler Elevator Corp., Houston
Mechanical and Plumbing: TD Industries, Houston
Electrical: Mid-West Electric, Houston