Pasadena Christian Center, Pasadena, California

A Pentecostal congregation asked us to accommodate three different functions within the singular volume of a World War II-era movie theater. Our design preserves the visibility of the clear-span Lamella roof structure, creating two shell form structures inside the existing volume used for children’s worship and education. Conceptually, the shell forms are related to the improvisational quality of Pentecostal traditions, which privilege “ecstatic” worship over iconographic representations. We designed the shells by digitizing our physical models and invented a notation system to produce construction documents.