For Immediate Release: March 24, 2008
New Arts Complex for Columbus State University Reinvigorates Downtown Columbus, Georgia
Minneapolis, MN - A new fine-arts and performing-arts complex for Columbus State University (CSU) in downtown Columbus, Georgia, provides state-of-the-art educational, studio, gallery and performance spaces that more than double the capacity for graduating arts majors.
The arts complex, designed by HGA Architects and Engineers (HGA), Minneapolis (in collaboration with Stevens %26 Wilkinson Stang %26 Newdow, Inc., Atlanta), includes the adaptive reuse of two existing, culturally notable buildings, seamlessly combined with a new steel, glass and brick theater building, thereby creating a contiguous block of facilities for arts programs.
The 125,000-square-foot complex includes a former cannon foundry, the Yancey Center at One Arsenal Place, which HGA converted into faculty offices and performance rehearsal rooms. Next door, HGA transformed a 50,000-square-foot former cotton warehouse into the Corn Center for the Visual Arts, which houses nine art studios, along with teaching spaces and galleries. Attached to the visual-arts warehouse is the new CSU Theatre on the Park, a 57,425-square-foot performing-arts center overlooking the Chattahoochee River, which includes proscenium and black-box theaters, as well as a two-story, glass-walled lobby that doubles as community public space.
Part of CSU's expanding RiverPark campus in the Uptown area of Columbus, the complex is located approximately 10 miles from the main campus and joins the university's Schwob School of Music, which had already re-located downtown. Sited on a bank above the river, the new arts complex establishes CSU's arts program as a vibrant presence in the east section of the city's formerly industrial downtown.
At the same time, HGA's innovative and economical reuse of industrial buildings, combined with a new structure that complements the old in design and materials, has helped spur the downtown area's redevelopment and revitalization. "Reusing buildings from a different generation, and a different economy, as a new cultural resource is an extremely cost- and resource-saving decision," says Loren Ahles, FAIA, project designer, HGA.
"If you were to take this arts program and build it entirely with new construction, you couldn't achieve two-thirds of the program we were able to using the two existing structures," Ahles adds. "So the economies of creating space and reusing buildings offer tremendous advantages. Reusing existing buildings is also ecologically sound."
CSU's arts complex is also located two blocks from the 2002 RiverCenter for the Performing Arts, designed by Hardy Holzman Phiefer Associates, and the Springer Opera House, constructed in 1871. These cultural facilities, together with CSU's new arts complex, have created an arts destination in downtown Columbus, which is enjoying a renaissance in performance spaces and theater-going opportunities.
Concurrently, the university has continued to develop student housing, parking facilities and retail space downtown to meet the growing needs of its students and visitors. "These initiatives are all contributing to the redevelopment of downtown," Ahles says. "As the arts, commerce and people move back into the city, CSU has become part of the Columbus's urban-renewal story."
Reclaiming History with Contemporary Design. Downtown Columbus was formerly a cotton-milling town, and its Uptown area a cluster of industrial buildings. Populated with sturdy structures constructed out of brick that was manufactured nearby, the area still has "many great old buildings, but there are also some missing pieces in the urban fabric," Ahles says. After consulting with HGA on a series of sites and buildings, CSU acquired a 1970s-era Pillowtex warehouse. The 50,000-square-foot building was constructed out of brick, and featured straight walls, long spans and a steel roof.
"Many of the visual arts-such as sculpture and ceramics-are basically light-industrial creative processes with special needs and conditions for supplies, refuse and a loading dock," Ahles explains. "So a warehouse that's basically a shell, with 22-foot-high ceilings, was perfect for reusing as an art building. The warehouse provided us with a clean, open palette for planning studios, galleries and teaching areas of various sizes."
HGA transformed the north side of the building into studios, placing the more light-industrial sculpture, ceramics and woodworking studios close to the loading dock, with drawing, painting, printmaking and digital arts further on. The studios for each discipline are distinct in size and shape, while they all have a resource area for procuring materials and tools. Because the solid masonry walls didn’t have any windows, HGA cut in glass slots on the north sides (as well as east sides) that rise up to join peaked skylights or light monitors, which allow morning and diffuse light to enter the studios and wash down the walls.
"Computer lighting studies showed us how much glass was enough, given Georgia's hot, direct sun," Ahles says. In addition to bringing natural light into the studios, the windows allow passersby to see the art making taking place inside the building. At night, when the row of slender windows is lit up from within the studios, the former warehouse takes on a lantern effect that enhances its new, welcoming aesthetic appeal.
Inside the warehouse, HGA retained the building's existing exposed brickwork, steel framing'historic character into the 21st century. HGA also created a series of workspace alcoves for critiquing and displaying artwork. These alcoves can be made private by closing massive metal sliding doors reused from the building.
Along the streetside of the warehouse/visual-arts building are a public exhibit space and student exhibit space with floor-to-ceiling, glass-and-aluminum curtain walls. HGA's plans include a future upper-level gallery for visiting artists. A new thoroughfare through the campus, One Art Street, passes by the glass walls from the eastern end of the campus (and public parking) to the new theater building, providing passersby with views into student art making as it occurs on campus.
Adaptively reusing an existing building like the Pillowtex warehouse, while introducing natural light into the existing structure, are among the most sustainable strategies possible in design and construction. But because HGA and CSU are both committed to incorporating sustainable-design practices to the maximum extent feasible, HGA also specified minimal interior materials, and products with sustainable-forest certification and recycled content whenever possible. In addition, mechanical systems were strategically modularized and zoned throughout the building to allow individualized environmental control.
Arts Education, Arts Destination. CSU and HGA decided to demolish the south end of the warehouse to make way for the construction of the new attached, 57,425-square-foot theater building. "That way we could create a contiguous space for the arts," Ahles says. A "more extroverted building" than the low, solid, visual-arts warehouse, Ahles continues, the theater was constructed using the same brick-quarried and produced within blocks of the site-"to stay with the masonry tradition associated with the neighborhood."
Because CSU requested that the theater lobby design also be dramatic enough to host campus, public and community events, the building's thin horizontal roof, supported by a stately promenade of open brick columns, soars over a two-story, west-facing, glass-walled lobby. The long and narrow lobby features entrances at both ends, and bay windows between the masonry columns that also face west and cantilever out toward the Chattahoochee River. "This transparency allows the interior of the building to read through to the outside, the adjacent park and the river beyond," Ahles explains.
The slender mass of the sturdy, two-footed brick columns, on which the horizontal roof slab rests and between which sit the glass balcony boxes, creates an aesthetic of grounded solidity combined with an airy transparency. "The bones of the building are heavy, solid, sturdy, while the infill-the lobby and windows-are much lighter," Ahles says. "We wanted to create an aesthetic counterpoint to the warehouse, while creating a lobby in which the distinctions between inside and outside would be blurred."
HGA conducted extensive lighting studies to maximize views without detracting from the sturdiness of the brick arcade or the lightness of the glass sheeting. Along the window walls and the glass balconies, the spacing of the aluminum ribs and glass panels between the masonry columns was proportionally determined by sun and shade concerns. "The roof overhang and the glass-and-metal window patterning softens the intensity of the direct sun coming in from the west. In the evening, the patterning allows low sun to come in and wash the lobby in light," Ahles explains. "In the late afternoon, the masonry columns block the hot sun by keep it from directly hitting the glass."
The vertical patterning of the columns, and the glass-and-aluminum window walls and balconies, also draws the eye up from the park and the river to the activity occurring on the first and second floors of the lobby. Passersby can then experience a sense of excitement about the creative activity "in a sense, the design allows the lobby to act as a billboard for the facility," Ahles says.
Inside the theater building are classrooms, acting studios, prop and costume shops, a 350-seat proscenium theater with a main level and a balcony, and a flexible 150-seat black-box or studio theater. The inside walls of the lobby and the proscenium theater are clad in yellow pine recovered from old cotton-warehouse timbers. The wood was provided by one of the theater's board members whose company reclaims timber from the area's old warehouses.
In the lobby, the wood walls feature built-in benches with views to the outdoors. Inside the theater, the wood-slat walls screen displacement ventilation for both the theater and lobby. But the wood walls also pivot in places to provide platforms for actors or musicians during more innovative or experimental theatrical staging. Both theaters, which connect to the lobby, are also supported by such backstage necessities as the scene shop, prop shop, costume lab and lighting/rehearsal lab. These spaces also open out to One Art Street, a new thoroughfare through the arts campus.
Maximizing Sites. Outside of and adjacent to the new arts complex is the horseshoe-shaped, 60,000-square-foot One Arsenal Place. HGA adaptively redesigned 34,796 square feet of the former cannon foundry to house offices and seminar rooms for the visual arts and theater departments. The timber-and-brick structure also includes a "shed" that's been converted to acting and dance studios.
HGA designed a sunken courtyard between One Arsenal Place and the visual arts/performing arts buildings for students, staff and faculty to enjoy.
"We 'played' buildings against buildings to create this enclosed yet open outdoor space," Ahles says. "This really is a fantastic site that we've maximized for CSU's growing arts campus, while helping to reweave the urban fabric of this downtown district."
Ahles adds that adaptively reusing existing buildings requires sensitivity to those buildings' past uses and future potential. "You have to give those buildings a voice in what their new uses will be," Ahles explains. "If you try to put nonconforming uses in a building that won't accept them because of, for instance, structural configurations or ceiling heights, it becomes a struggle in which you're going against the nature of the building."
"The cotton warehouse and the cannon foundry really imparted themselves to their new uses," he adds, "and allowed for the addition of a new theater building to be slipped in between them."
In creating a new location for CSU's arts programs, through a complex of buildings that encourage new levels of creativity, HGA has also created a new arts destination for downtown Columbus.
:: View Columbus State University Performing and Studio Arts Campus
HGA Contact: Julie Luers (612) 758-4000 e-mail JLuers@hga.com
Media Contact: Susan Evans, Evans Larson (612) 338-6999 e-mail susan@evanslarson.com