Bill Viola «The Treshold»
Campuses Getting Architecturally Striking Arts Buildings
国外各大校园的建筑
The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College
Richard B. Fisher Center 表演艺术学院
The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College
伟廉姆戏剧舞蹈学院
The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College
伟廉姆戏剧舞蹈学院
The dance studio at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College
伟廉姆戏剧舞蹈学院
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 16, 2006 - The scientists got their laboratories, the jocks their plush weight rooms and climbing walls. Now, at last, the massive campus building boom of the last 15 years is getting around to the performing arts.
From big, public universities to small, liberal arts institutions such as Williams College, schools around the country are throwing unprecedented sums at new and often architecturally striking arts venues.
The big winners, of course, are student dancers, actors and musicians. Long accustomed to cramped, dark spaces, many are now enjoying more inspiring quarters, along with top-of-the-line electronics and acoustic setups. Top-shelf artists are taking their tours to campus.
The result, instructors say: Students are simply performing better.
''When you have a great building, you are inspired to do something great,'' said Leon Botstein, conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and president of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., which opened a new arts center in 2003. ''For us, the building had the immediate impact of raising the aspirations of everyone involved in the arts.''
But schools aren't just trying to please their theater majors. They are looking to these buildings to help attract students and faculty from a range of fields who are interested in culture, and to improve town-gown ties by making the local college a place to see a show or concert.
Some of the new structures are the most exotic buildings on campus.
The most unusual include Bard's Fisher Center, a Frank Gehry-designed, soaring, silver wing-like structure, and a new, $50-million theater complex that opened this fall at Williams. Other schools christening new theaters recently include Emory University in Atlanta ($37 million), and the universities of Denver ($70 million), Notre Dame ($64 million), Maryland ($128 million) and California, Davis ($46 million).
The University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Miami of Ohio and Sonoma State in California are among the many schools in various stages of planning and fundraising for new buildings. Princeton has opened a new theater and recently announced a $101 million gift for the arts.
Yet, in a sense, culture-lovers on campus still are at the end of the line.
Today's building boom comes well into a run that began in the early 1990s. Sports centers had more voluble supporters and offered stronger marketing opportunities. Competition for more and better students led to cushier dorms and a race of ever-more-luxurious campus centers. New science and engineering labs offered the promise of more research grants.
But there are signs students also want more from the arts at school. While the number of high school SAT-takers expressing interest in pursuing an engineering major has risen just 4 percent over the last decade, the increase for the visual arts has been 44 percent, according to an analysis by Art & Science Group, a consulting firm.
''These colleges want a well-rounded student body,'' said William Rawn, the Boston architect who designed the Williams facility and has worked on several others. ''They realized they were missing a whole category of students who, because they were interested in theater, tended to go to urban schools.''
In fact, city schools like Penn and New York University have been surging in popularity not only among arts students but overall, and rivals in quieter places are eager to persuade applicants they won't have to give up civilization to come there.
''Notre Dame is assuming the responsibility of bringing some of the benefits of a large metropolitan area, like Chicago or New York, to the community,'' said Dan Saracino, assistant provost for enrollment there. The $64 million DeBartolo Center, now in its second academic year, has already enticed Wynton Marsalis, the New York Philharmonic and the Soweto Gospel Choir to play a date in South Bend, Ind.
Performing arts buildings also are a weapon on another front in the recruiting wars: the ever-intensifying battles for the best professors.
''A lot of schools have as their goal to be a top-20 research institution,'' said Stan Boles, a Portland, Ore., architect who specializes in theater design. ''To get there, it's not just having the research buildings, it's having the faculty. And they're interested in what it's going to be like to live there.''
Though arts supporters may be less numerous than sports fans, many have deep pockets. The venues are enormously expensive, particularly at colleges determined to build something memorable. The curving, silver roof pieces of Bard's $62 million Fisher Center soar out of a wooded hill on campus; the Williams building features a giant sliding door that separates one of the theaters from the outside hallway.
Many schools, meanwhile, are complementing main stages with more intimate ''black box'' theaters for student productions. Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center has 10 interconnected buildings and takes up 17 acres. And even after theaters are built, colleges may find themselves continuing to subsidize them for years to attract top talent and keep prices affordable for students.
Susan Farr, executive director of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, says administrators there realized Maryland could be a great research center but not a great university unless it made a major commitment to the arts. Smaller schools, meanwhile, pride themselves on a broad, liberal education and think of the arts as an area where they can offer a distinctive experience.
''The digital age is a cold age, and live performance is a warm medium,'' said Herb Allen, a Wall Street financier who gave $20 million for the project at Williams, his alma mater. ''I thought if a school is dedicated to campus and campus life, the more it can expand its warmth, the more it's going to be perceived and received by the people who go there.''
With their course load and social calendars, many students aren't taking full advantage of the new buildings, and it's community members who are filling seats. But that can be good, too. At Western Carolina University, an arts-heavy school with a 340-person marching band and a $30 million facility that opened last fall, Chancellor John Bardo says one goal of the building is to tie the community to the growing population of retirees in the area.
''Is someone who grew up in Ohio and moves here going to support our athletics right off?'' he said. ''Probably not. But they will support the arts.''
Sam Bogan, a junior trumpet player at Western Carolina, said he's already seeing promising music students more seriously consider the school now.
''It's definitely easy to be proud when there's something like the trumpet festival in there,'' he said. ''It's nice to know there's a community that's trying to build up the arts program.''
返回页首
国外各大校园的建筑
The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College
Richard B. Fisher Center 表演艺术学院
The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College
伟廉姆戏剧舞蹈学院
The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College
伟廉姆戏剧舞蹈学院
The dance studio at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College
伟廉姆戏剧舞蹈学院
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 16, 2006 - The scientists got their laboratories, the jocks their plush weight rooms and climbing walls. Now, at last, the massive campus building boom of the last 15 years is getting around to the performing arts.
From big, public universities to small, liberal arts institutions such as Williams College, schools around the country are throwing unprecedented sums at new and often architecturally striking arts venues.
The big winners, of course, are student dancers, actors and musicians. Long accustomed to cramped, dark spaces, many are now enjoying more inspiring quarters, along with top-of-the-line electronics and acoustic setups. Top-shelf artists are taking their tours to campus.
The result, instructors say: Students are simply performing better.
''When you have a great building, you are inspired to do something great,'' said Leon Botstein, conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and president of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., which opened a new arts center in 2003. ''For us, the building had the immediate impact of raising the aspirations of everyone involved in the arts.''
But schools aren't just trying to please their theater majors. They are looking to these buildings to help attract students and faculty from a range of fields who are interested in culture, and to improve town-gown ties by making the local college a place to see a show or concert.
Some of the new structures are the most exotic buildings on campus.
The most unusual include Bard's Fisher Center, a Frank Gehry-designed, soaring, silver wing-like structure, and a new, $50-million theater complex that opened this fall at Williams. Other schools christening new theaters recently include Emory University in Atlanta ($37 million), and the universities of Denver ($70 million), Notre Dame ($64 million), Maryland ($128 million) and California, Davis ($46 million).
The University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Miami of Ohio and Sonoma State in California are among the many schools in various stages of planning and fundraising for new buildings. Princeton has opened a new theater and recently announced a $101 million gift for the arts.
Yet, in a sense, culture-lovers on campus still are at the end of the line.
Today's building boom comes well into a run that began in the early 1990s. Sports centers had more voluble supporters and offered stronger marketing opportunities. Competition for more and better students led to cushier dorms and a race of ever-more-luxurious campus centers. New science and engineering labs offered the promise of more research grants.
But there are signs students also want more from the arts at school. While the number of high school SAT-takers expressing interest in pursuing an engineering major has risen just 4 percent over the last decade, the increase for the visual arts has been 44 percent, according to an analysis by Art & Science Group, a consulting firm.
''These colleges want a well-rounded student body,'' said William Rawn, the Boston architect who designed the Williams facility and has worked on several others. ''They realized they were missing a whole category of students who, because they were interested in theater, tended to go to urban schools.''
In fact, city schools like Penn and New York University have been surging in popularity not only among arts students but overall, and rivals in quieter places are eager to persuade applicants they won't have to give up civilization to come there.
''Notre Dame is assuming the responsibility of bringing some of the benefits of a large metropolitan area, like Chicago or New York, to the community,'' said Dan Saracino, assistant provost for enrollment there. The $64 million DeBartolo Center, now in its second academic year, has already enticed Wynton Marsalis, the New York Philharmonic and the Soweto Gospel Choir to play a date in South Bend, Ind.
Performing arts buildings also are a weapon on another front in the recruiting wars: the ever-intensifying battles for the best professors.
''A lot of schools have as their goal to be a top-20 research institution,'' said Stan Boles, a Portland, Ore., architect who specializes in theater design. ''To get there, it's not just having the research buildings, it's having the faculty. And they're interested in what it's going to be like to live there.''
Though arts supporters may be less numerous than sports fans, many have deep pockets. The venues are enormously expensive, particularly at colleges determined to build something memorable. The curving, silver roof pieces of Bard's $62 million Fisher Center soar out of a wooded hill on campus; the Williams building features a giant sliding door that separates one of the theaters from the outside hallway.
Many schools, meanwhile, are complementing main stages with more intimate ''black box'' theaters for student productions. Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center has 10 interconnected buildings and takes up 17 acres. And even after theaters are built, colleges may find themselves continuing to subsidize them for years to attract top talent and keep prices affordable for students.
Susan Farr, executive director of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, says administrators there realized Maryland could be a great research center but not a great university unless it made a major commitment to the arts. Smaller schools, meanwhile, pride themselves on a broad, liberal education and think of the arts as an area where they can offer a distinctive experience.
''The digital age is a cold age, and live performance is a warm medium,'' said Herb Allen, a Wall Street financier who gave $20 million for the project at Williams, his alma mater. ''I thought if a school is dedicated to campus and campus life, the more it can expand its warmth, the more it's going to be perceived and received by the people who go there.''
With their course load and social calendars, many students aren't taking full advantage of the new buildings, and it's community members who are filling seats. But that can be good, too. At Western Carolina University, an arts-heavy school with a 340-person marching band and a $30 million facility that opened last fall, Chancellor John Bardo says one goal of the building is to tie the community to the growing population of retirees in the area.
''Is someone who grew up in Ohio and moves here going to support our athletics right off?'' he said. ''Probably not. But they will support the arts.''
Sam Bogan, a junior trumpet player at Western Carolina, said he's already seeing promising music students more seriously consider the school now.
''It's definitely easy to be proud when there's something like the trumpet festival in there,'' he said. ''It's nice to know there's a community that's trying to build up the arts program.''
