Designed for Artists. Built for Everyone.

Much of the excitement about the Performing Arts + Culture Center is what will be inside: Plenty of room for the arts to take up space and make joyful noise.

Beyond the large, Broadway-scale performing arts theater, the Center will feature a range of accessible arts and events spaces: A community theater, at least two flexible spaces for rehearsals and performances that will be designed to be affordable for small and diverse cultural arts organizations.

It all adds up to a new center of gravity for the arts and a place for K-12 students and families to experience and participate in performances and events. The goal is simply to break down barriers to theater access while providing new platforms for voices and stories from all corners of our region.

Top of mind in designing the academic and community spaces will be flexibility and access. Along with our friends at Bora Architecture & Interiors, we’ve been looking at some of their recent projects to get ideas of how we can maximize flexibility in Center spaces, while also ensuring excellent acoustic engineering to support commercial performances and community use.

For example, the Michigan State Billman Music Pavilion features one beautiful and precisely engineered space that can accommodate rehearsals, classes and performances all in one flexible space.

The Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at the University of California in Davis features a 170-seat studio theater with full technical capabilities paired with adjustable architectural, technical and acoustical elements, including retractable stadium seating.

And the Lingle Music Hall in the Earlham College Center for Visual and Performing Arts shows how one space can be a 250-seat multi-modal performance hall, rehearsal space, banquet hall, recording studio and classroom — sometimes all in a single day!

It’s exciting to think of the possibilities that a new arts hub will bring to our city and to all the arts lovers in the surrounding region. What would you like to see happen in these spaces?