Cathedral of Hope Interfaith Peace Chapel
Dallas, Texas

The Interfaith Peace Chapel at the Cathedral of Hope topped out March 29. We provided structural design and construction support services including Tekla modeling and connection design to Cunningham Architects for the chapel designed by Philip Johnson in the late 1990s. The one-story steel-frame structure consists of 4,000 sf below grade and 4,000 sf above. It has no defined column grids, a unique and undefined geometry and curved asymmetrical internal and external membranes. Working collaboratively, our Dallas and Kansas City offices fitted a Tekla Structures building model inside the architect’s Rhino surface model to define the geometry of the steel frame and to avoid field conflicts. This project is our firm’s first in which nearly 100% Tekla-generated design drawings were produced for the architect and contractors using Tekla Structures BIM software.