Commercial Architecture
Good Samaritan Community Center
Springdale, Arkansas
The Good Samaritan Community Center transforms and expands an existing Springdale church into a 6,800-square-foot center for worship, meals, food assistance, and personal support. A carefully integrated addition preserves the balance of the original architecture while creating a commercial kitchen, dining hall, market, Care Advocate offices, and accessible community spaces.
Visit Samaritan Community Center
Client mission
A faith-based center designed to serve the wider community.
Samaritan Community Center retained the sanctuary of the former church while expanding the building around its faith-based and community-focused mission. The renewed facility brings worship, food assistance, shared meals, and personal advocacy together in one recognizable Springdale home.
Program
New spaces support nourishment, care, and connection.
The renovated and expanded wing includes a commercial kitchen, dining hall, food market and pantry, upstairs Care Advocate offices, restrooms, and accessibility improvements. Exterior and site work extend the renewal beyond the interior and create a more welcoming, functional place for clients, staff, volunteers, and the congregation.
Design response
A one-sided addition that preserves the building’s balance.
Adding to only one wing of an existing symmetrical church required a careful response. The addition maintains the established eave height and continues the rhythm of the original materials and forms, allowing the new work to read as part of the building without competing with its central sanctuary. A cohesive material palette and a broader exterior facelift unite old and new while correcting elements—including the primary entrance—that had not performed well over time.
Life safety
Different occupancies coordinated within one existing envelope.
The sanctuary’s assembly occupancy required fire separation from the new kitchen and dining hall and the offices above. That separation was carefully coordinated within the existing building envelope to support life safety, health, and welfare while preserving the independent function of each space and the ways they work together as one community center.
Architectural services
A coordinated process from programming through construction.
Fugitt + Wheeler provided programming, schematic design, construction documents, consultant coordination, and construction administration in partnership with Samaritan Community Center and Commerce Construction. The completed project gives the organization a renewed, recognizable setting for its continuing work in Springdale.
Architectural services
- Programming
- Schematic design
- Architecture
- Construction documents
- Consultant coordination
- Accessibility improvements
- Construction administration
Project team
- GA Engineering · MEP engineering
- Pinnacle Design Consultants · Structural engineering
