Moncton Wesleyan Church in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, grew from a church of 65 members 40 years ago to the largest in Atlantic Canada.
Pastor Laurel Buckingham’s Sunday service now regularly attracts 2,000 worshippers at a new campus that has undergone multiple building programs since the early 1980s. The most recent addition produced Celebration Centre, a 2,000-seat, multipurpose auditorium, the largest such facility east of Montreal. The multipurpose venue is used for church, school, community, corporate and public entertainment events. It has quickly become the preferred venue of the area and is credited with increasing church attendance by 20 percent since opening a year ago.
“We have averaged two to three sizeable events a month,” Buckingham said. “This is definitely not a place where you just meet for an hour every Sunday. Our facilities are always in use, and the auditorium is in many ways a subtle outreach to the Moncton community. We wanted more than a church building when we set out on this recent expansion. Our goal was to produce a comfortable, inviting facility equipped with state-of-the-art audio/ visual production capabilities that can serve not only church but secular events.”
When the original bids came in over budget for the church, the building committee turned to Acadian Construction, Dieppe, New Brunswick, to work with Architects 4, Moncton, on the project. Acadian Construction led a structural redesign around preengineered metal building systems supplied by Robertson Building Systems, Ancaster, Ontario, Canada, and split the project into two phases-a remodel and new construction-to achieve better control.
The different approach in project management made the delayed project economically feasible, with the new auditorium built in the second phase. The church even gained a desired building atrium enlargement that serves as an environmentally controlled circulation spine to reach the various spaces produced over the years.
Repricing the framing to a metal building system resulted in a more than $180,000 reduction compared to the originally proposed long-span conventional steel structural system. Robertson supplied the structural framing, standing-seam metal roof and wall system insulated to R-20. Reinforced fiberglass blanket insulation also provided cost-effective sound absorption that was computer modeled beforehand by an acoustical specialist.These and other improvements brought the 36,200- square-foot (3,363-m2) church, including a 700-seat mezzanine, to completion under budget.
Titan Steel, Moncton, was the erector, and Valron Engineers Inc., Moncton, was the structural engineer.
Robertson Building Systems
