Emerson College

Narratives

Architect Narrative

The architect has been planning and designing facilities for this college’s urban campus since 1994. Traditionally, the school has purchased existing downtown office buildings and renovated them for classroom, lecture and housing uses. In 2000, the college asked the architect to design the school’s first new building. The project, a 78,000 square foot, 11-story structure, was designed to be a performance and production center, bringing together the college’s theater and broadcasting departments. The building houses a 210-seat thrust stage theatre, a 130-seat end stage theatre, two television studios, a two-level art gallery, stage set and costume design studios, lecture rooms and faculty offices. The building is completely wired for cable television and data servicing the campus cable system. The project was constructed in conjunction with the renovation of an adjacent 100-year-old professional stage theatre, a project also designed by the architect. Combined, the two projects provide the college and the city with a state-of-the-art center for live performance, broadcast and video production education.

Completed in 2003, the new structure is an extremely complex building both functionally and geometrically. Built at the end of an 250-foot-long alley on a 7,000 square foot site bounded on all four sides by adjacent buildings, it consists of ten levels above grade and one below. As it is boxed in at the end of the alley, which services the stage doors of two adjacent theaters, the building required a beacon to draw attention to itself from the street. There is a view of the full height of the building only from the mouth of the alley at the street. A computer-choreographed LED lighting system was installed in each of the glass-walled stair vestibules on floor. At night, these fixtures are capable of producing lights in thousands of colors and infinite permutations up the height of the building, making its presence known to passersby.

Two cantilevered curtain wall elements give added character to the exterior of the building while offering better sightlines and views to the street. Along the third- and fourth-floor theater lobby, a downward sloping curtain wall cantilevers over the alley, angling out 14 degrees at the end facing the alley’s entrance.