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At this early stage of the design process, Visioneering organizes what they call “Basecamp” experiences. Imagining the design/build process as an expedition, Basecamp is the launching point, where our teams gather together at the base of the mountain, reflect on where we’ve come from, dream about what lies ahead, and orient ourselves for the thrilling, arduous adventure that is to come. And talk a little bit about building codes and budgets.
Basecamp began with the Visioneering team getting to see our church campus for themselves. Their team consisted of Dave Milam (Chief Strategy Officer), Bob Bergmann (Creative Principal), Alison Chou (Project Designer), and Tony Torres (Studio Manager). We were delighted to find out that Allison was familiar with our church and attended college with our very own pastoral intern Leighton Okada! Thankfully, her previous knowledge of Leighton did not dissuade her from working with us.
We were able to walk them through our current building, and while there have been LiDAR scans, blueprint examinations, and many conversations up to this point, there really is nothing like being able to welcome guests into our home and ask them to stay a while. Our site tour then led us to the new space at 529 Van Ness, and we got to marvel together at spooky hallways, play “what’s that smell,” discover where they keep the asbestos, and dream a little about what the space could become.
Later that evening, Visioneering met with our elders, deacons, staff, and their families. Dave and Bob skillfully led us through times to seek the Lord’s help, to reflect on our current facilities, to share hopes and fears, and to even let us take a crack at designing our future campus. Dave offered us a fun encouragement to embrace this stage as a chance to dream without limitations, not worrying about things like fire code or budget. This evening was to be a chance to dream, and he assured us that we would kill dreams later. Some of our people definitely took the advice to heart: there were more than a few sky bridges and multi-level parking structures that were envisioned.
After the focus group ended and all of our church leadership meandered back home, the Visioneering team’s night was just ramping up. They found a late night sushi restaurant (we are thrilled that we have found kindred spirits that enjoy food as much as we do) to begin to synthesize what our leadership shared and to sketch out rough plans for what the campus could become. Purportedly Bob worked on this until 2 AM!
The next morning, the Visioneering team returned to the church to debrief with our Campus Expansion Planning Team. Based on the Basecamp discussions and Bob’s late night machinations, we were able to review a number of different big picture options for how to utilize the campus. While many of the options look promising, each have their pros and cons, and the next step will be for Visioneering to refine the plans, develop rough cost analysis for each, and help us think through the operational implications. Our Planning Team will have several check-point meetings with them over the next few weeks to discuss their findings. At this point, we are so excited for our relationship with Visioneering, and we are so thankful for their guidance on this particular adventure. Unfortunately, we don’t have any concrete details about the design of the campus that we can share at this time; we hope to have a definitive plan that we can reveal to the church family over the next few weeks. What we can safely say is that there will not be a sky bridge. Some dreams have to die.
