H3 worked with Wright State University to renovate the 358-seat Benjamin Marian Schuster Concert Hall in the Creative Arts Center. Completed in 1973 and significantly expanded in 1990, the Creative Arts Center houses the Department of Art and Art History, Theatre Arts and Music, as well as the University Arts Galleries. Schuster Hall is the primary concert hall in the building that supports the University’s nationally-respected music program.
Despite its relatively small seat count, Schuster Hall suffered from a lack of intimacy, focus, and audience-performer connection. The entrances were awkward, with doors opening directly to noisy hallways. The asymmetrical room had one poured-in-place-concrete wall.
The redesign of Schuster Hall will updates the outdated acoustics to flexibly accommodate all aspects of musical performance, including bands, choral, orchestra, student ensembles, faculty ensembles and opera theater. A key goal was modernizing the Hall in order to be competitive with other state and national programs. Wright State is one of the most accessible campuses in the nation, so improving ADA access to and within the hall is also a primary concern.
Our approach to the redesign was to create a space that looks like it was designed for music and feels warm and comfortable. We also aimed to use materials that do double duty for acoustics and aesthetics. We conducted shape and wall-wrapping studies to decide the best way to approach the room’s unique shape and prioritize the best way to invest the limited budget. The new plan creates symmetry by reshaping the proportions of the room and reducing the seat count to 307. Vertical wooden slats ripple towards the front of the room to draw audience focus to the stage.
CLIENT: Wright State University
COMPLETION: 2012
SIZE: 6,000 square feet
COST: $3.2 million
H3 master-planned a new School of Music and Conference Center for the Chautauqua Institution, a 750-acre educational complex in southwestern New York State. The non-profit organization, founded in 1874, occupies a dramatic lakeside site, with many of its buildings designated National Historic Landmarks. It is a forum for discussion of public issues, international relations, literature, and science. It is also a center for the arts, home to its own symphony orchestra, ballet company, conservatory theater, and opera company.
The new School of Music serves Chautauqua’s orchestral, piano, and vocal departments and provides ten rooms for vocal coaching and teaching, ten for instrument teaching, in addition to new administration facilities. H3’s assignment also involved renovation of practice shacks (including one once used by George Gershwin), and three theaters: McKnight Hall, 500-seat Lenna Hall, and Sherwood Studio.
The new conference center is a multiple-use facility housing arts faculty, support staff, and performing and visual artists and their families. It contains 135 guest rooms, a 250-seat music room for performances, seminar rooms, a business center, and board rooms.
CLIENT: Chautauqua Institution
COMPLETION: Phased Implementation 2006
SIZE: School of Music: 31,000 s.f.; Conference Center: 154,000 s.f.
COST: $30 million
The Royden B. Davis, S.J., Performing Arts Center is the first building devoted to the performing arts at Georgetown. The Performing Arts Center combines two buildings; the 16,000 square foot existing Beaux-Arts Ryan Building and a new 40,000 square foot addition. The Center commands a hillside site overlooking a Jesuit cemetery. Named after Father Royden B. Davis, S.J., a past dean of the College, the Davis Center contains two halls: the 250-seat Gonda Theater and the 100-seat Devine Studio Theater, as well as scene and costume shops, rehearsal rooms, and offices.
The intimate Gonda Theatre is the building’s heart, finished in warm wood tones with dark blue and red side walls and vibrant patterned seating fabric. The Gonda Theater’s proscenium is the first on campus, permitting of a range of dramatic productions and providing a flexible environment for scenic design. The scene and costume shops and rehearsal rooms function as non-traditional classrooms, sized to allow faculty and students to gather, collaborate, and experiment.
The existing Ryan building, built originally as a gymnasium, is now the Center’s main lobby and the theater entrance. This interweaving of new and old construction permitted the smallest possible footprint on the site, simplifying the theater’s placement between buildings and along roadways. A saw-tooth corridor connects the lobby to the Devine Studio theatre, a fully flexible black-box theater, one level below. The translucent oval that announces the theater’s presence inside the lobby is visible at night from the main campus entrance.
Georgetown’s students of design and technical theater have flourished, able to learn in a facility that supplies well-outfitted shops, flexible performance spaces, and space for experimentation.
CLIENT: Georgetown University
COMPLETION: 2005
SIZE: 56,000 Square Feet
COST: $15 Million
Our staff designed 500,000 square feet of new student housing in UCLA’s Northwest Campus. This master-planned community added 2,000 student beds and program areas in three new high-rise residence halls: Hedrick Summit, Rieber Terrace, and Rieber Vista. The complex accommodates increased enrollment and enhances the quality of student housing.
Each of the three new residence halls is nine stories and promotes student interaction on each floor. Lounges, meeting rooms, and common areas are readily accessible, while ground floors contain larger meeting rooms, study spaces, and group offices. Rieber Terrace includes a 170-person dining facility featuring fresh, made-to-order food and indoor/outdoor seating. A second 120-person dining facility, in an adjacent existing building, offers late-night café dining and a coffee bar.
Accommodations consist of four- or ten-person suites. Each contains private shower and toilet facilities, and computer networking capabilities. The ten-person suites, for upper classmen, include individual rooms for each student and a separate common area. Wall-to-wall glazing and solar shading insure abundant natural light and efficiency in each room; operable windows offer views of the ocean and mountains.
The Northwest Campus is landscaped to provide for outdoor study and relaxation. Trees were relocated with native planting to maintain lush landscape. Brick and terrazzo paving extends pathways into residence hall lobbies.
CLIENT: University of California Los Angeles
COMPLETION: 2004
SIZE: 541,226 SF New Construction; 72,833 SF Renovation
COST: $131,000,000
H3’s team master planned and implemented a major renovation and expansion of Vassar College Libraries. Since opening in 1905, the College’s English-style Thompson Library had been joined by several additions including the 1937 Van Ingen and the 1976 Lockwood. Incremental expansion accommodated growth, but sacrificed clear circulation. We prepared a master plan to allow the library, which serves a student population of 2,250, to function better as a single, cohesive facility, while adding a 30,000 square foot addition.
The master plan reorganizes and expands facilities while integrating digital technology. The renovation and expansion adds clarity of organization and space and offers areas for socializing and interaction.
Improvements include: electronic facilities for research and teaching; enhanced reference serices; special-collections archives; additional reading rooms and seating; group study-rooms, seminar rooms, and an electronic classroom; and an exterior courtyard with network connections and moveable seating. Project construction was phased to allow for continuous library operation.
On this campus, renowned for its beauty and the variety of architectural styles of its 100 buildings, the renovated and expanded Vassar College Libraries are better able to serve as the cohesive nucleus of campus academic life.
CLIENT: Vassar College
COMPLETION: 2001
SIZE: 170,000SF
COST: $15.5 Million
H3 was commissioned to design the Roger S. Berlind Theatre, at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre Center for the Performing Arts. The theater provides a much-needed, long-discussed second stage for the McCarter’s programs.
The addition includes two rehearsal rooms, lobby spaces, dressing rooms, and stage support facilities. The public entrance provides direct access to the rehearsal rooms, at entry level, and to the theater, via elevator and stairs, on the second floor. One of the rehearsal rooms contains a lighting grid and loose chairs, which enable its use for lecture demonstrations or workshop productions.
The 350-seat auditorium is enclosed in a sloping, curved seating dish that enfolds the large proscenium. Access doors permit performers to pass from stage to front-of-house with ease. Supplemental seating is provided at an upper level.
Exposed trusses, ducts, and lighting grids give this room a “rough-and-ready” appearance consistent with the experimental work envisioned by the program. A rear projection booth, catwalks, and side lighting accommodate theatre technology.
A fly tower backs up to the McCarter’s scenery loft, allowing the stages to connect. Loading is at stage level, adjacent to the existing loading-dock, facilitating the shared use of equipment.
CLIENT: Princeton University, McCarter Theatre
COMPLETION: 2003
SIZE: 28,360 square feet
COST: $11.2 Million
Packer Collegiate Institute is a pre-kindergarten to grade 12 private school in Brooklyn. Founded in 1845, the campus grew from what is now the main building, enlarged in the late nineteenth century, to include an 1846 brownstone and the St. Ann’s Church building, acquired in 1969.
H3’s master plan called for spaces that would support the lower, middle, and high schools’ individual goals and in so doing integrate the church into the overall design.
The project consolidates each division’s classrooms into discrete areas, with the middle school being housed entirely within the church. H3 added five science rooms and eighteen new classrooms with ample accommodation for technology. The school boasts a new performing-arts center and expanded and consolidated libraries, along with faculty office space, a new student and faculty fitness center, and a commons with food service capabilities for hosting events.
In order to maintain the church facade’s architectural integrity, we placed a contemporary building within the historic shell. Further juxtaposing new with old was the creation of a multi-level glass-enclosed structure that connects the new middle school, the commons, and the main building.
CLIENT: Packer Collegiate Institute
COMPLETION: 2003
SIZE: 68,000 square foot renovation,
9,000 square foot new construction
COST: $17 million
Our staff designed P.S. 69, a six-hundred-student pre-kindergarten through fifth grade school in Brooklyn, New York.
The four-story facility comprises two wings linked by an open, light-filled atrium featuring a monumental stair. One wing contains the main public spaces: lobby, gymnasium, library, auditorium, and cafeteria. The second wing houses classrooms. Each wing has its own entry niche, complete with sitting area, display case, and bulletin-board wall.
P.S. 69 was the first public school in New York City to boast an entirely wireless computer network, obviating the need for computer workstations. This gave teachers the flexibility to configure classrooms in ways that best met their needs; it also gave them the ability to conduct classes outdoors and in informal indoor gathering spaces.
CLIENT: New York City School Construction Authority
COMPLETION: 2002
SIZE: 100,000 square feet
COST: $35 million
The New York School of Interior Design was housed in an urban turn-of-the-century horse stable that had been transformed first into a K-12 girls’ school before being recreated as an Interior Design School. The School acquired an adjacent brownstone for a much-needed expansion of administrative offices. The firm was responsible for the restoration and expansion of the School located in a Landmark District and provided programming services to the new gallery spaces. Programmatic elements include connection and renovation of the two structures; transformation of the old high-ceiling gymnasium into the new library; expansion to the third and fourth floors of the brownstone and construction of a new fifth-floor daylit studio.
Interiors transformed include a limestone floor entry foyer and gallery, a connecting stair, accessible routes throughout both buildings and sunny studio and classroom spaces. A renovation to the existing 70th Street building’s gallery spaces in the cellar provide new facilities for juries and presentations and new graduate studios were created on the floor formerly occupied by administrative offices. A cafe, library, lecture hall, and bookstore were added to the buildings’ ground floors and exposed brick walls have been refinished.
CLIENT: New York School of Interior Design
COMPLETION: 1998
SIZE: 12,520 square feet
COST: $2 million