A chapel and abbey for Cistercian Preparatory School in Irving, Texas — new construction built with the material discipline and craft sensitivity that sacred architecture demands.
Project Type
Ground-Up Sacred Architecture
Location
Irving, TX (Cistercian Preparatory School)
Program
Chapel & Abbey
Client
Cistercian Preparatory School
Pillar
Specialty / Preservation Sensitivity
Sacred architecture doesn't operate on the same timeline as commercial construction. A chapel isn't built for a 30-year lease cycle. It's built to serve a community for generations. Every material choice, every structural decision, every detail carries that weight.
Cistercian Preparatory School needed a chapel and abbey that honored the Cistercian monastic tradition — an order founded in 1098 whose architectural legacy spans nearly a millennium. The building had to feel timeless without being a replica. Modern construction methods serving a purpose that predates modern construction by eight centuries.
Religious architecture demands a level of craft that most commercial projects never approach. Stone and masonry work, acoustic design for liturgical use, natural light engineered to serve both function and meaning — these aren't finish upgrades. They're fundamental to what the building is.
ANDRES brought the same material sensitivity developed on historic preservation projects like Cathedral Guadalupe to a ground-up structure. The difference: instead of preserving existing craft, the team had to create it. Every stone course, every joint, every timber connection had to meet a standard that exists outside commercial tolerances.
ANDRES is known for adaptive reuse — 18 projects, $950M in completed work. Cistercian Abbey demonstrates the other side of that capability. The same teams that restore 100-year-old buildings understand how to build new structures that carry the same material honesty and craft precision.
Preservation sensitivity isn't just about protecting what exists. It's a way of thinking about construction — where the material is the design, where tolerances matter at the level of individual joints, where the building has to be right because there's nothing to hide behind. That discipline transfers directly from restoration to sacred new construction.
Complexity Highlights
LITURGICAL ACOUSTIC REQUIREMENTS
A chapel designed for Cistercian liturgy — Gregorian chant, spoken prayer, communal worship — has acoustic requirements that differ fundamentally from commercial assembly spaces. The room had to support unamplified voice across the full congregation without echo, dead spots, or excessive reverberation. Construction tolerances in wall surfaces, floor materials, and ceiling geometry all served the acoustic program.
MATERIAL AUTHENTICITY
Sacred architecture communicates through materials. The Cistercian tradition values simplicity and honesty — no applied finishes masking structural reality. That meant the construction had to be the finish. Exposed masonry, visible timber, stone that is both structure and surface. Every trade understood that their work wouldn't be covered by the next trade. What they built is what the community sees for the next hundred years.
COORDINATION WITH RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY
Building on an active school campus for a monastic community required scheduling and site management that respected the institution's daily rhythms. Construction noise, material staging, and crew access all had to work around academic schedules, liturgical calendars, and the community's expectations for their campus environment during a multi-year build.
Team Continuity
THE KNOWLEDGE
NEVER LEFT
THE BUILDING.
The ANDRES team that built Cistercian Abbey included leadership with direct experience on Cathedral Guadalupe — a $100M restoration of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Dallas. That project demanded the same material sensitivity, the same coordination with religious stakeholders, and the same understanding that sacred spaces operate on a different standard than commercial construction.
That institutional knowledge — how to work with religious communities, how to manage craft-intensive construction, how to deliver buildings that serve purposes measured in centuries — transferred directly from restoration to new sacred architecture. Same team. Same standards. Different century.
Building something that matters starts with a team that understands permanence.
Talk to the contractor that builds for centuries, not lease cycles.