Fairfield Chapel And Rectory Win Architects Award

A community of Jesuits required a home and a center for their religious mission. The architecture reflects their commitment to simplicity, spirituality, and intellectualism. Aware of their role as teachers and spiritual guides, the Jesuits sought a building that would serve as an exemplar of ecological architecture. This residence and apostolic center sits at the heart of a campus and houses Jesuit priests, offices, a chapel, community dining room, great room, and library. The site is prominent and lovely, a steeply sloping hillside bounded to the south by mature European beech trees that frame distant views to Long Island Sound. The building rests on the shoulder of the slope, organizing its community spaces beneath the low plane of a garden roof, uninterrupted except by the monitor that lights the chapel, the spiritual heart of the building. All design decisions promote the smooth function of a combined social center, religious sanctuary, and home and optimize the building’s environmental performance. Operable windows promote natural ventilation, reduce mechanical loads, and admit winter sunlight onto dark concrete floors that absorb and radiate solar energy. Natural daylight floods the interior. Renewable materials line the building’s surfaces. The building overhangs its foundations, protecting the root systems of the giant beech trees that surround it and that shade the building’s southerly windows during hot summer months. The garden roof filters storm water, reduces heat loss, and increases the durability of the roof membrane. A closed-loop geothermal heating and cooling system provides energy to the building without fossil fuels. Both traditional site and building design best practices and innovative environmental technologies serve to reduce short-and-long term impact on the local and global environment, helping the Jesuits to achieve their goal of acting as “good stewards of the Earth.”

Link (here) to the AIA 
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This buildings cost $10 million to construct, 12 Jesuits live in this facility, divide 12 by ten million dollars, that equals $833,000.00 per Jesuit