In 2005 the nation's largest church, Lakewood Church in Houston, decided to relocate to a former sports arena and transform it into an intimate worship experience for 16,000 congregants. Led by Pastor Joel Osteen, the church took the Compaq Center, added a five-story building that includes a 27,000 s.f. media suite for audio and video production, replaced and renovated all of the systems throughout the campus, and created a facility that is unrivaled in both its capacity and the environment it offers for worship. The project involved three separate but related challenges: live sound, television broadcast, and audio / video recording and post production. Russ Berger Design Group (RBDG) initially was sought out to design the new broadcast and production facilities, but also was asked to oversee acoustics within the main worship space.
The challenge of converting a sports arena to an intimate worship experience for RBDG meant significant changes to the acoustics within the space as well as making it a much quieter venue. At the same time, RBDG was dealing with a variety of noise and vibration issues, such as sound isolation from the concourse and a new chiller plant, and from traffic on the freeway just outside the building. A barrier beneath the arena seating was needed as part of the fire separation scheme for the new sanctuary, so RBDG made it serve triple duty in also achieving acoustical separation from the nursery spaces below and for low-frequency absorption in the main worship space.
For the Media Suite, RBDG provided acoustical, architectural and interior design services for the fifth floor of the new Family Life Center, which houses the video and audio production control rooms, camera shading, audio recording studios, post production, editing, and graphics rooms, as well as the central technical equipment hub for broadcast and media systems campus-wide. Besides handling audio and video production from the sanctuary, the media suite eventually will capture audio and video feed from the adjacent TV studio currently in design.