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I was there for several meetings, involved in planning.Tarheel Baptist said:bgwilkinson said:Tarheel Baptist said:bgwilkinson said:fishinnut said:Except for a funeral I attended, I haven't been in a church with pews in over 10 years. BTW, it looks like a lot of space between the pews there. Did they take some out & spread them out?bgwilkinson said:Sunday AM October 22, 2017.
These are pew backed theater seats. The seats are spring loaded and move to the full upright position if you don't hold them down.
Because the seats flip up the space between the seat backs is wide enough to be rated as a fire aisle. This rating allows the number of isles to be greatly reduced which greatly increases the number of theater seats in a given space.
In the pic, you see in the foreground an area where the seats have been removed so that an 80' lift can more easily be moved in and out without the hassle of taking the seats in and out.
Other than these few seats all other seats are installed as they were when the building opened in 2005. The building still seats around 6,200.
Completely off the OP?s topic, but why ?pew backed theatre seats??
Sorry, I thought I explained the reasoning. When the seats automatically flip up you can easily walk between the seats and the pew back of the unit in front of you. This gives you a greater density of seating because you need fewer aisles.
I believe there are 30 inches available as a walkway so it is rather easy to walk between the seats as if they were not there, because of this spacing it counts as a fire aisle and means you can have 20 to 30 or more seats in a row and still abide by fire egress regulations. There is no need to wiggle sideways as we did in the old auditorium. Every row of seating is in effect a legal fire aisle.
The old pews did not meet fire regulations and were a hazard to our safety. They were highly illegal and opened us up to massive litigation had something happened that required speedy evacuation of the old building. That is why we have so few aisles in the new building compared to other auditoriums using pews.
The old building now uses far greater chair spacing than the old pews used. No, you can not cram or stuff as many people in the building now, but they are a whole lot safer should rapid egress be required. Of course, that means the old building now holds about 20% fewer people than it did with those old pews.
I understood about the logistics of individual chairs and spacing. But why not simply have chairs? I would assume the pew look added cost to the project.
In fact, B.G. W. Had a huge part in the project.
So he can correct me, if I'm fuzzy on the details, but I think the solid back was cheaper than the individual theatre seats.
One aspect which we really liked, was that there were far less bolt down points, with these.
It makes sense at the time, for a variety of reasons.
I spent 2 years sitting in those pews, and they are very practical, especially to move for big events.
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