Establishing a campus around a tranquil, Flexible courtyard

At the Cathedral Campus, our challenge was to integrate human, natural, and spiritual elements into a unified whole. The design team saw the potential for the campus to become more functional and more inspirational, inside and out.

Composed of landscape architects, architects, urban designers and interior designers, the team worked with the client to study numerous options for this site in the historic center of Wheeling. An ideal scheme emerged that combined selective demolition, adaptive reuse of historic structures, and strategic additions to establish a new religious place surrounding the historic St. Joseph’s Cathedral. The two principal exterior spaces, the Cathedral Plaza and the Marian Garden, sprang from this cross-disciplinary planning and design process. Using a contemporary yet contextually sensitive design approach, the Cathedral Campus has established a new place and identity for the Diocese.

The landscape effectively knits the Campus together through human, natural, and spiritual elements, to the extent that the buildings and landscape are now inextricable. They form a unified Campus that is as functional as it is inspirational. The orchestrated spatial experience from outside to inside will only become stronger as materials patina and plants become more established, and natural materials of light, water, stone, trees and flowers continue to make their own subtle symbolic connections to those primal spiritual landscapes of pre-history, evoking a lasting emotional response that supports the liturgical and spiritual mission of the church.