A Growing Religion

When Mormon pioneers first came to Mesa in the late 1800s, it was a sleepy farm town.

Now the East Valley area has mushroomed into Arizona's third largest city and is one of the top 40 largest cities in the United States.

Spectacular growth has also come for Mormons and their religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Growing from a few hundred faithful concentrated in Utah, the church has spread worldwide and now numbers more than seven million adherents - -and counting.

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Of course, all those adherents need places to worship, and the church is now constructing upwards of 500 new buildings a year. And practice makes perfect.

"The church has a standard plan and then the local leadership picks the color schemes and the building styles," said Scott Lutes, an architect with Mesa's EMC2 Group, the project architect on a new church going up on Southern Avenue just east of Crismon Road. "We just fill in the holes."

The church is being built under a construction manager-at-risk contract. Crews from Porter Brothers Construction were eyeing a January completion date on the 24,000-sq.-ft. church that will function as a meetinghouse and stake center for the L.D.S. Church. On Sundays, the new church will host more than 1,000 worshippers.

The 2 X 6 wood-framed, slab-on-grade project is fairly typical of L.D.S. Church work, with an eye toward economy and versatility.

"The drawings are much more extensive than you would see on a normal construction project," said Douglas Snow of Mesa-based structural engineering firm Snow and Associates. "They are very, very detailed and comprehensive."

Lutes said the church has gone back and forth between structural systems, alternating between wood frame and concrete masonry. Lately, the church has swayed back to the wood-frame type. Local availability and costs are often factored in to determine the best building system.

The standardized design means fewer headaches for both contractors and designers on this project, which started in April.

"The church has done enough of these that they know exactly what they want and exactly what they don't want," said Porter Brothers' project superintendent Don Kindred. "They know what works for them and what doesn't."

The church is famous for its basketball programs, and to keep the new space versatile, a sliding partition door separates the main, 4,000-sq-.ft. chapel from the basketball court. When crowds overflow the chapel on Sundays, the partition doors are slid back, allowing space for seating on the basketball court.

The church also keeps an eye on electric bills, with the facility featuring 26 individual heat pumps. The individual pumps allow only the occupied areas of the church to be heated and cooled.

"The driving force behind the package units is maintenance and a little lower cost than a central plant," said mechanical engineer Randy Robinson of R.J. Robinson Engineering of Glendale, Ariz. "A central plant would be running all the time, which in a church, doesn't make much sense."