Brown University Granoff Center for Creative Arts

Brown University Perry and Marty Granoff Center for Creative Arts


Brown University’s Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, which opened in February 2011, is designed to encourage the kinds of collaborative, interdisciplinary programming that defines Brown’s exceptional presence in higher education.

The joining of Brown’s arts departments under one roof originated with the advisory board’s initiatives to underwrite new collaborative opportunities — among them, a series of grants for performances, exhibitions, symposia, lectures and new media projects.

The components of various arts programs overlap visually and programmatically in the space. There is a 225-seat room for music, film, lecture, theatre, and movement, as well as three production studios of varying sizes, from 40 to 120 seats in flexible arrangements. These are meant to comprise the central goals of the building, giving way to new possibilities for ambitious multimedia installations, presentations, and performance-based work. Both the studios and the main theatre are fit with state-of-the-art equipment to support new media programs, studio and visual art, and theatre.

  • Client: Brown University
  • Architect: Diller Scofido + Renfro
  • Completion Year: 2011
  • Location: Providence, Rhode Island
  • Acoustician: Jaffe Holden
  • Capacity: 225 seats

Awards
  • LEED Gold Accreditation
  • 2011 SCUP Honor Award, Excellence in Arch., New Building

Links

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts | Claire Tow Theater

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Claire Tow Theater


For many years, the Lincoln Center Theatre Company has had a need to supplement the Vivian Beaumont and the Mitzi Newhouse spaces with a small, less formal performance space.

In February 2010, Lincoln Center Theatre announced plans to construct an addition on the roof of the Vivian Beaumont Theater. This addition will include the Claire Tow Theater, rehearsal rooms, office space and a roof terrace. The theatre is the new home of LCT3, the programming initiative devoted to producing the work of emerging playwrights, directors and designers.

Through mounting fully staged, modestly budgeted productions, LCT3 is bringing a new generation of artists and audiences to Lincoln Center.

  • Client: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
  • Architect: H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture
  • Completion Year: 2011
  • Location: New York, New York
  • Acoustician: Jaffe Holden Acoustics
  • Capacity: 100 seats

Awards

Links
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Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts | The Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
The Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center


The Film Society of Lincoln Center, headquartered at the Walter Reade Theatre, has always offered the public a complete cultural experience. One of the newest additions to the Lincoln Center campus, the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center allows the Film Society to present an even wider range of programming, including films, installations, panels and presentations, performances, and even late-night snacks at their wifi-equipped cafe.

A complex design puzzle on which Rockwell Group collaborated with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, what was once a parking garage and underused offices is now home to three presentation spaces: the intimate 90-seat Howard Gilman Theater, the 150-seat Beale Theater, and an innovative space called the Amphitheater. The Amphitheater is at the heart of the new building and its back wall opens to the lobby and cafe for greater visibility of panelists, performers, and the 152″ Panasonic Plasma screen it houses. Equipped with Web 2.0 and capable of hosting international artists and filmmakers in real time, the facility has become an interactive media destination within the Lincoln Center campus.

  • Client: Film Society of Lincoln Center
  • Architect: Rockwell Group
  • Completion Year: 2011
  • Location: New York, New York
  • Building Size: 17,500 s.f.
  • Capacity: 150 seats

Links

Media

La Maison Symphonique

La Maison Symphonique


The new home of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra was erected in the heart of the Quartier des spectacles is on the esplanade of Place des Arts at the corner of de Maisonneuve and rue Saint-Urbain.

Responding to the highest international standards in acoustics, board development, and architecture, the new acoustic concert hall was built around the concept shoe box. This model is favored by managers of the best acoustic concert halls in the world. The rectangular model shoe box is distinguished among others by its long and narrow spaces corresponding geometric proportions.

The model shoe box has no backstage or pit, or unnecessary physical facilities on which sound waves can bounce. For this reason, the room is not designed to meet the needs of theater performances, dance, ballet or opera with sets. The auditorium itself — 21 meters high, 50 meters long, and 25 meters wide — allows sound to be projected in all its dimensions, thereby further enhancing privacy and reaching the sound quality.

  • Client: Montreal Symphony Orchestra
  • Architect: Diamond Schmitt Architects
  • Arch. of Record: Aedifica
  • Acoustician: SoundSpace Design
  • Completion Year: 2012
  • Location: Montreal, Quebec
  • Capacity: 1,900 seats

Awards
  • 2013 Wood Works Quebec Cecobois – Mention
  • 2012 Canadian Consulting Engineering Award of Excellence
  • 2011 Gold Award The Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships
  • Innovation and Excellence in Public-Private Partnerships
  • 2011 Grands Prix du Design Awards, Wood Promotion
  • Interior Design Award
  • 2011 FRAME Award of Excellence Quebec Institute of Reinforcing Steel
  • 2011 Award of Excellence, Commercial / Institutional
  • Category Canadian Institute of Steel Construction, Quebec Chapter

Links

Smith Center for the Performing Arts | Reynolds Hall

Smith Center for the Performing Arts | Reynolds Hall


The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in March 2012, has already made an impact on what promises to be a major cultural transformation in Las Vegas. The Smith Center has a state-of-the-art 2,050 seat multi-purpose hall, a 150 seat studio theatre and a 200 seat cabaret theatre. The large theater will present Broadway shows and other major touring attractions as well as orchestral, opera and dance performances. The studio theatre will feature more intimate productions, such as dance and drama, as well as being the orchestra’s rehearsal hall. The cabaret will house jazz, cabaret, children’s performances and community events.

The 2,050-seat Reynolds Hall is at once grand and intimate: patrons feel close to the performers on stage without any compromise in sightlines. The design team has set a new standard for American multipurpose halls. The orchestra shell is designed to work seamlessly with the architectural character of the room; the rigging system ties the box tier doors into the acoustical drapery system in order to make the hall more absorptive for amplified events; the air-conditioned grid ensures not only the health of the workers but also the preservation of the electronic equipment.

  • Client: Smith Center for the Performing Arts
  • Architect: David.M.Schwarz Architects
  • Arch. of Record: HKS Architects
  • Completion Year: 2012
  • Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
  • Lighting: SBLD Studio
  • Acoustician: Akustiks
  • Building Size: 233,000 s.f.
  • Capacity: 2,050 seats

Links

Country Music Hall of Fame

Country Music Hall of Fame


From its conception in 1961 to the opening of its Music Row home in 1967, its move to downtown Nashville in 2001 through the April 2014 opening of its new facilities that more than doubled its size, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum has had a continuing core mission: to shed light on country music’s evolving history, breadth, practitioners and flavors, and to honor them all.

The new 10,000-square-foot exhibit space, which comprises the ACM Gallery and the Fred and Dinah Gretsch Family Gallery, is a key public element of the Hall’s $100 million expansion. Designed by Nashville’s Tuck Hinton Architects, the expansion extends seamlessly from the existing Hall, increasing by 210,000 feet in total the previous 140,000-foot space.

A new Taylor Swift Education Center, funded by contributions from Ms. Swift and the National Endowment for the Arts, increases to six from one the classrooms available for the Hall’s “Words and Music” songwriting classes for Nashville area schoolchildren; a new dedicated Distance Learning Lab means schools from across the globe can arrange for similar experiences.

The state-of-the-art, strikingly modern, horseshoe-shaped 800-seat CMA Theater is used for major Hall programs, and civic and private events. The space is highly adaptable, providing the perfect setting for more than conference performances: general sessions, sales meetings, television broadcasts, press conferences, and other functions.

  • Architect: HKS
  • Arch. of Record: Tuck Hinton Architects
  • Completion Year: 2014
  • Location: Nashville, Tennessee
  • Acoustician: Akustiks
  • Capacity: 800 seats

Awards
  • LEED Silver certified

Links

Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive

Berkeley Art Museum – Pacific Film Archive


Forward-looking and versatile, the new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will be a dynamic and engaging place to experience our diverse art, film, performance, and education programs, and to access our extensive collection and archives.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s design for the new BAM/PFA combines the 1939 concrete Art Deco-style former printing plant, unoccupied since 2004, with a new metal-clad structure. The new design creates a cohesive and visually arresting space for art, film, education, civic interaction, and administration. Plans call for the industrial building—currently a single-story, skylighted structure with a three-story administrative wing at its east end—to house the museum’s collection and exhibition galleries, a thirty-two-seat screening room, museum store, learning center, K–12 education areas, community gallery, and offices.

The new structure, extending between the corner of Oxford and Addison Streets and the museum’s Center Street facade, includes the 230-seat PFA Theater, Library and Film Study Center, special event space, collection study area, café, and nonpublic areas. The facility is thus defined by two primary and integrated components: the imaginatively repurposed older building and a complementary, forward-thinking multipurpose structure.

  • Client: Berkeley Art Museum
  • Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
  • Arch. of Record: EHDD
  • Completion Year: 2015
  • Location: Berkeley, California
  • Building Size: 82,000 s.f.
  • Capacity: 230 seats

Awards
  • 2016 AIA New York Design Awards, Merit Award – Architecture

Links

Western Connecticut State University School of Visual and Performing Arts

Western Connecticut State University
School of Visual and Performing Arts


For years, the Theatre Department at WCSU has been doing terrific work under far-from-ideal conditions. With the opening of the Visual and Performing Arts Center, teachers, performers, directors, designers, and technicians finally have a facility equal to their talents.

The Center’s facilities include: Scenery and costume shops for instruction and construction. A large rehearsal space, which can also serve as a black box studio theatre for informal performances. Smaller rehearsal spaces for scene work and classes. The department’s centerpiece — and companion to the Music Department’s Concert Hall — is the 350-seat proscenium theatre. It has an ideal audience capacity — a decent size, but not too large. An otherwise wonderful student performance might be lost in a larger space. With its balcony and side seating galleries, the theatre is designed to foster a dynamic, intimate relationship between the performer and the audience.

  • Client: Western Connecticut State University
  • Architect: Holzman Moss Bottino
  • Completion Year: 2014
  • Location: Danbury, Connecticut
  • Acoustician: Jaffe Holden
  • Building Size: 130,000 s.f.
  • Capacity: 350 seats

Links

Awards

  • 2015 Connecticut Magazine, Best Of Connecticut Award
  • 2013 CFSEI Design Excellence and Construction Innovation Award

BLUEBARN Theatre

BLUEBARN Theatre


BLUEBARN Theatre is a small, artisanal, hand-made theatre company in downtown Omaha, NE. After reading “The Neutrality Trap,” the article by Josh Dachs about studio theaters in the January 2012 issue of American Theater Magazine, AD Susan Clement-Toberer decided to get in touch with FDA — and has been working together with us since then.

With the resurgence of real estate prices in downtown Omaha and the deterioration of the space BLUEBARN has rented and improved, they decided to try to build a home of their own that they could own. The total project budget was limited to $6 million and the building to just under 15,000 GSF.

At the same time, it was critical to maintain the special character of the BLUEBARN, and not sterilize out all the things that made it special to visit and work in. The upstage wall opens onto a rear “porchyard” that will serve as an outdoor event space, shop area, and an opportunity for alternate staging both inside and out. Their lobby features ceramics made by the AD’s husband, handmade serving counters, and an amazing collection of beautiful artist-made show posters. These two ideas — a unique hand-crafted experience for a very low budget — are what have led our thinking during the design process.

  • Client: BLUEBARN Theatre
  • Architect: Min|Day
  • Completion Year: 2015
  • Location: Omaha, Nebraska
  • Building Size: 15,000 s.f.
  • Capacity: 99 seats

Awards
  • 2017 ACEC Nebraska Engineering Excellence Award, Merit (MEP)
  • 2016 IES, International Merit Award
  • 2016 IES, International Illuminance Award
  • 2016 ACSA Faculty Design Award
  • 2016 AIA San Francisco Special Commendation for Urban Design
  • 2016 AIA Nebraska Honor Award for Architecture
  • 2016 AIA Central States Merit Award for Rebar Wall (detail)

Links

Columbia University, Lenfest Center for the Arts

Columbia University
Lenfest Center for the Arts

Photo Credit: Frank Oudeman & Davis Brody Bond


The Lenfest Center for the Arts plays a central role in the Manhattanville campus and in the life of the University. This facility, designed by Renzo Piano, is more than a beautiful building containing an art gallery, a film screening room, a presentation space, and a performance space: it serves as a hub for the creation of new works and the refinement of works-in-progress across various media, featuring exhibitions, theatrical performances, symposia, and lectures that present new artistic voices and perspectives from around the globe. The resources made available by the center also strengthen Columbia’s longstanding ties to the vibrant local arts community based in Harlem, generating partnerships with talented artists in northern Manhattan and throughout New York City.

FDA has designed an up to 120-seat flexible studio theatre and a 150-seat film screening room for the School of the Arts.

  • Client: Columbia University
  • Architect: Renzo Piano Building Workshop
  • Arch. of Record: Davis Brody Bond
  • Completion Year: 2016
  • Location: New York, New York
  • Acoustician: Arup
  • Capacity: 150 seats

Links

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