Trahan Architects completes circular chapel in New Orleans with CLT structure

May 22. Trahan Architects finished a round chapel on a New Orleans university campus. The building is 4,620 square feet, clad in brick, and structured entirely in cross-laminated timber.

The studio, which runs offices in New Orleans and New York, built the Chapel of St. Ignatius with what they're calling a "sense of mystery." That's the phrase in the release. The mystery appears to mean: you can't see inside from the street. The brick facade wraps the perimeter without large windows. Light enters through a clerestory ring at the roofline.

CLT as primary structure is still the tell for a certain kind of American institutional project in 2026. It reads sustainable without requiring the client to explain why. The material also allows for speed: timber frame goes up faster than poured concrete, and the chapel's circular plan would have been expensive to form in concrete anyway. Brick over CLT is the move when the building needs to feel permanent but the budget or timeline doesn't allow for masonry structure.

The circular plan itself is a chapel default. No corners means no hierarchical seating, which is the liturgical argument. It also means the acoustic is more even, assuming the interior isn't over-damped. Trahan's earlier work leans toward the monumental, so a 4,620-square-foot building is small for them. This one appears to be about the detail work: how the brick coursing meets the roofline, how the timber is exposed or concealed inside, whether the entry sequence actually delivers on the mystery framing.

The building is in New Orleans, where Trahan is local. That matters for a university chapel commission: the studio knows the humidity, the brick suppliers, the timber detailers who can work in a Gulf climate. A circular brick chapel is a known typology. The question is whether the execution is tight enough to justify the coverage. Dezeen filed it, which suggests the interior photos are worth the click.