St. Teresa of Avila Parish is an urban Chicago parish originally founded in 1889. Due to the gentrification of this older neighborhood, parish membership has grown significantly in recent years. It has also become ethnically diverse. The challenge for this spiritually strong parish was to meet the needs of this active community.

RuckPate Architecture facilitated the Master Plan, in which all events—Town Hall presentations, reports, and drawings--—were made bilingually, in English and Spanish. The planning committee originally envisioned renovating the parish’s deteriorated 1920's parish hall, riddled with accessibility problems. The participatory planning process revealed deficiencies in other aspects of fellowship and worship. The 1960 church building had a tiny narthex. Children’s Liturgy of the Word required the youngsters to go outside the church and down the block to the parish hall, often in inclement weather.

After careful evaluation, a more future--oriented, comprehensive option of demolishing the existing parish hall represented better stewardship and paved the way for more global thinking. The new parish hall is on a single floor, and provides a gathering center which will serve as the new entrance to the church. As part of the addition/renovation, RuckPate proposed and has designed a dramatic new Blessed Sacrament Reservation Chapel, visible to the assembly, and a Reconciliation Chapel. The design team was careful to preserve and improve important shrines to Our Lady of Providence and Our Lady of Guadalupe.

For more information on this project,
contact RuckPate at info@ruckpate.com.

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