Jackson & Ryan Architects | The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter Chancery

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter Chancery
Houston, Texas

The North American headquarters for The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter Chancery was seamlessly integrated into the 30-year-old parish of Our Lady of Walsingham as Phase 1 of an expansion program. This building is essentially the main office building for the Ordinariate. As such, it includes office suites for present departments and any future administrative areas that will be needed by this newly formed organization: the Office of the Ordinary as well as Business, Risk and Legal, Archives, Virtus, Insurance, Human Resources, Development and Judicial offices.

This two-story stone building has public spaces on the ground floor, including a polychrome, vaulted entry hall that features four large-scale Italian mosaics, and a precisely detailed courtyard that features inlaid marble symbols of the twelve apostles, elaborate balconies and a marble statue of the Good Shepherd. The ground floor also has an assembly hall and a reception area with elaborately detailed staircases. The second floor includes an Oratory with a wood beam vaulted ceiling and carved marble altarpiece, the main Ordinariate offices, a state-of-the-art distance learning conference room, and arched loggias trimmed in stone and cast stone.

Great effort was made to evoke the historical atmosphere of the architectural style preferred by the Ordinariate - from the cast stone and wood-trimmed arched windows, to the original artwork commissioned in Italy, to the intricate use of the Golden Section proportion for determining the placement of every line, window, door and string course on the facades.