An ancient art form for civic participation, theater has evolved into the modern world as a vocation of the culturally refined, with its significance in daily life diminished. Theater space is valued for its potency for formal cultural productions, rather than its power to include and divert, and to be instantaneous. Contemporary performance theaters increasingly become standardized: a combination of two different-sized auditoria and a black box, with conservative internal operation principles for authentic work. Can a public theater still be inclusive, accommodating the classic and the serendipitous, the highbrow and the masses, the artistic and the social a place for the creative life of all?
Partners-in-Charge: Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten
Client: Authority-in-Charge: Taipei City Government; Executive Departments: Department of Cultural Affairs, Department of Rapid Transit Systems (First District Project Office), Public Works Department (New Construction Office)
It’s curtains up at Villanova’s Joan and John Mullen Center for the Performing Arts, ready for the Fall/Winter 2022 performance season.
The building is the final project and centerpiece of a major redevelopment along Lancaster Avenue that transforms once-overlooked stretch into a new heart of student life at Villanova. The cultural center anchors the new district and complements Commons, a recently-completed complex (also designed by VMA) that adds 1,100 beds of student accommodations, storefront retail spaces, and a network of landscaped gathering places.
The award-winning Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center at Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services is nearly complete after a major renovation and expansion of the non-profit’s beloved 56-year-old temple. In addition to being the future home to Vista Del Mar’s innovative therapeutic performing arts programs, the building will provide the city with a new 300-seat event venue. Construction is scheduled to be fully complete in mid-Spring 2021, with the center opening soon thereafter.
A state-of-the-art venue, the BuddyHollyHall of PerformingArts and Sciences, has opened in Lubbock, Texas. Totaling 220,000 square feet, the hall – the first of its size and type in the region – was planned and designed by internationally recognized theatre design firm, Schuler Shook, architectural firms Diamond Schmitt Architects, Parkhill, and MWM Architects, along with acoustician Jaffe Holden.
Located in the heart of Downtown Lubbock, BuddyHollyHall offers unique arts and entertainment experiences to a growing city, and a home for both top-tier and emerging artists. It is the largest performingarts center within 100 miles of Lubbock.
The project, which won the architectural project competition for the Ted Ankara College Campus with a capacity of 6000 students in 1998, was implemented in 2005 and educational activities have begun. Conceptualized and designed by Semra Uygur and Özcan Uygur, this campus is a city simulation accomplished adopting the principle that education should create its own urban life even if it is in an area remote from the city. As a result of this design principle, TED Ankara College Campus operates as an actual city with the daily circulation routes designed considering the diversity of common indoor-outdoor areas, functional arrangement, meeting of various users, and the requirements emerged within the process.
Mount Royal University’s Taylor Centre for the Performing Arts is a welcoming and dynamic environment for both music performance and education. In use by the Mount Royal Conservatory, established in Calgary in 1910, the facility was designed to provide music education for the entire university and community at large, including students from age 3 to adulthood, and also to express connection to place and the direct correlation between the learning and performance of music. The design expresses the unique geography and history of Calgary, located at the heart of Alberta, where the western prairies meet the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The area’s iconic imagery includes the lone barn on the vast open prairie landscape; the teepees of the region’s aboriginal inhabitants the Scarce and the Stony peoples; and the Alberta rose, which blooms wild and is the province’s official floral emblem. These elements inspired and informed the design process, beginning with the structure and form-making to the deliberate lighting, colors and finish material selections.
This multifunctional studio theatre with production and support spaces provides Boston University’s internationally acclaimed School of Theatre with a 21st-century learning environment for collaboration and experimentation. Collocated on BU’s Charles River Campus with the rest of the College of Fine Arts for the first time in decades, the theatre creates a new era of engagement for the University community, the Town of Brookline, and area residents. With its dramatically reflective façade framed by a delicate concrete scrim, the 75,000-square-foot theatre complex delights and instructs, giving architectural form to Hamlet’s injunction to the players “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.”
Tags: Boston, Massachusetts Comments Off on Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre and the College of Fine Arts Production Center in Boston, Massachusetts by Elkus Manfredi Architects
The insertion of the designed object clashes with the convergence of different factors: the outstanding presence of Saint Nicholas’ church and the adjoining plaza with the annex building of the former town hall, the intricate identity of the residential volumes around, the harsh party wall of the telecommunications building and the oblique crossing of two marked local arteries. They are all joined together on this singular scenery of intense social and cultural connotations.
As a “living memorial” for President John F. Kennedy, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts takes an active position among the great presidential monuments in Washington, D.C. Through public events and stimulating art, the Kennedy Center offers a place where the community can engage and interact with artists across the full spectrum of the creative process. The REACH expansion, designed by Steven Holl Architects, adds much-needed rehearsal, education, and a range of flexible indoor and outdoor spaces to allow the Kennedy Center to continue to play a leadership role in providing artistic, cultural, and enrichment opportunities.
The design for The REACH merges architecture with the landscape to expand the dimensions of a living memorial. The landscape design includes a narrative reflection on the life of President Kennedy: a grove of 35 gingko trees, which will drop their golden autumn leaves in late November, acknowledges John F. Kennedy’s position as the 35th President of the United States; and a reflecting pool and mahogany landscape deck are built in the same dimensions and mahogany boards of Kennedy’s WWII boat, the PT109.
The House for Singing & Choir Performance Center is a performance hall and education center for classical choir singing located amongst the rolling fields of Israel’s rural area of Emek Hefer.
The House for Singing is comprised of a Main Concert Hall of 550 seats, a smaller hall of 100 seats, a recording studio, two rehearsal rooms – one large and one medium sized, together with a generous foyer area and office spaces. All interior facilities will be under one roof, whereas unique exterior facilities are extended outside the walls of the building, where there is a garden dedicated to Sound, Music and Singing. The garden will consist of various outdoor spaces suitable to hold concerts and performances, teach classes, and will provide a social place for families and the community to spend time.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
