Churches and Religious Facilities

St. Paul of the Cross Monastery

In 2019-2020 the Saint Paul of the Cross Monastery Church Sanctuary underwent a complete interior restoration and renovation. Improvements included cleaning, restoration and painting of ornate plaster and marble columns and high curved ceilings, new seating pews throughout, and multiple new marble statues, shrines, alter and tabernacle surround. The entire sanctuary floor is framed above a crawl space, which varies in depth from nearly enough room to stand to barely enough room to crawl. The existing framing and foundation system had to be field verified by KSS from this crawl space, and utilizes multiple materials over multiple eras construction (including wood and steel joists, heavy timber posts and grillage beams, steel beams and shoring posts, and brick masonry walls and piers).

Working very closely with O’Brien & Keane architects, the owner, contractor and marble supplier, KSS came up with unique, creative solutions to support each of the new heavy marble furnishings that would be both safe and constructible on the existing framed sanctuary floor. These solutions varied from reinforcement of the existing structure, to new foundation elements which projected through the floor and crawl space to the earth below. The tabernacle surround, at over twenty-seven feet tall and over ninety-thousand pounds, was supported by an unusually shaped, cast-in-place concrete pedestal which fit within the marble “skin” and distributed the load to three different existing brick wall and pier elements below. Due to its height, the tabernacle surround also required structural steel lateral bracing back to the existing structure, which was installed in a manner that would keep it hidden from the view of the congregation.