The Cathedral of Hope

The Cathedral of Hope, also known as East Liberty Presbyterian Church, is a Historical Landmark Building in East Liberty (a neighborhood of Pittsburgh). It was constructed between 1932 and 1935 with much funding from the Mellon family. The church hosts many varieties of services from Taize Sung prayer to contemporary musical-style services to traditional Sunday services. This being said, they need to have a great deal of flexibility in their facility. Also, being a Historic Landmark, they strive to protect the aesthetic of the architecture with any addition of equipment or remodeling. With these things in mind, we embarked on two projects for them: a new sound system in the main sanctuary and two new electronically-controlled retractable projection screens. For the main sound system, we removed the old loudspeakers mounted in the second floor balcony and replaced them with a pair of JBL CBT 70J-1 column loudspeakers, with CBT 70JE-1 bass extension modules, and two pairs of CBT 50LA-1 delay fills mounted just above standing head height. Lowering the speakers drastically improved speech clarity, but brought them into a more visually auspicious position. In order to make it so the speakers did not detract from the architecture, we painted them in our shop to match the stone that they are mounted on. Similar visual treatment was needed for the projection screens. We mounted them over arches that are on either side of the altar area and constructed wooden pieces that mimicked the projector case so they could be mounted closer to the center of the sanctuary, but still appear to be centered over the arch. We then painted them so they appear to be stone work. Again they blended right in and most people do not notice them until they are deployed. For this project, we achieved satisfaction in both the aesthetic and audio-visual functionality realms.