Doudna Fine Arts Center
Cultural Facility Performs Duet with Existing
Facility
by Elaine Schmidt Construction
began early this year on a new structure that is meant to reflect the creative
endeavors inside the fine art departments of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston.
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The $45 million project, the Doudna Fine Arts Center, is a combination
of renovations to 85,000 sq. ft. of existing arts center space and the addition
of 165,000 sq. ft. of new space. The project will include performance and classroom
spaces for the university's theater, music and visual art departments. It is slated
for completion in autumn 2006.
The new center will contain studios for
various visual art departments, including sculpture, pottery, jewelry making,
printmaking, drawing, painting and metal working.
Two existing theaters,
the 600-seat Dvorak Concert Hall and a smaller recital hall, will be gutted and
renovated. A new, 275-seat proscenium theater, a studio (black box) theater and
a 150-seat lecture hall will be added, as will music labs, theater shops and faculty
offices.
The facility's original structure was built in 1958. A wing was
added in 1959 and a theater in 1972.
Scott Turnbull, project manager for
general contractor Core Construction of Morton, Ill., said the current project
began with the demolition of one of those additions, which connected to the main
structure via a hallway, and three additional freestanding structures.
Dealing with Utilities As in any university construction job, the Doudna
project had to deal with student safety, maintaining pedestrian and vehicular
traffic and integrating the new structures into the existing infrastructure of
the campus.
"We have had a lot of underground site utilities that
had to be rerouted" because the building will cover a street that is being
taken out of service as a campus thoroughfare, Turnbull said.
"Seventh
Street had the city storm and water mains and electric lines, so we had to reroute
all those city utilities without disruption," he added.
Some of that
utility work was straightforward but not all of it.
"Like most large
college campuses, this one is heated and cooled from a central plant," Turnbull
said. "So we also had steam and chiller lines on the site and we couldn't
interrupt any of that service." In addition, the local utility is performing
a major upgrade in the area, replacing several substations.
The utility
rerouting required the construction of temporary lines to carry service during
demolition and construction.
"We are building on a temporary electrical
system and won't have a permanent system until next summer," Turnbull said.
The
age of the EIU campus also became a factor in sitework.
"This campus
was started in the 1890s," Turnbull said. "Back then I don't think they
had a master plan for the entire campus." More than a century of building,
demolition, renovation and utility work has made it difficult to tell what's where
in terms of utilities.
Has Distinctive
Look Meanwhile, the structure's striking geometry and glass and copper skin
will clearly identify it as the art school and will help unify the old and new
portions of the building, Turnbull said.
"Tying the old and new together
and incorporating three departments into one building were our challenges,"
said Jose Sanchez, design architect for the project design firm, Antoine Predock,
and project manager for the Doudna Center.
"We did not want the departments
segregated. We wanted a lot of cross pollination between the departments. These
different entities should all learn from each other."
The solution
to integrating old and new was found in wrapping the new structure around the
outside of the existing building on three sides. And the solution for connecting
the departments runs right through the middle of the structure.
All of
the building's diverse activities and venues are connected via an open, glass-encased
central concourse. The space, which will be flooded with natural light during
the day and serve as an inviting beacon at night, will link the various departments
via open staircases and bridges that Sanchez described as, "evocative of
catwalks."
He said the concourse, which his firm calls a "crystalline
formation," is intended to serve several purposes.
"The concourse
is the main place where the different groups in the fine arts departments come
together, but it is also the place where the community interfaces with them,"
he said, referring to it as a "community watering hole." And he added
that because the concourse sits on what used to be a campus thoroughfare, "We
are going to have culture damming up Seventh Street."
The building's
distinctive skin is a significant departure from the concrete exterior of the
existing building and its additions, but if funds become available, a new skin
will be added to the exposed portion of the existing structure to make it mesh
with the new construction, Sanchez said.
Ensuring Good
Acoustics As with any performing arts venue, acoustic considerations are a
prime concern on the Doudna Center. Jaffe Holden Acoustics Inc. of Norwalk, Conn.,
handled the interior.
Sanchez said several of the performance venues are
separated by big corridors, which create the isolation required to keep sound
from events in one space from bleeding into others. But other areas, including
practice rooms and mechanical spaces, required special acoustical handling.
Turnbull
added that insulation and acoustical doors are among the sound-dampening measures
that will be used in the structure.
Floating floor slabs, which are separated
from the concrete subfloors by interstitial space that provides acoustic isolation,
also are being installed, he said.
Turnbull predicted that two large tasks
still ahead for the project will be the setting of steel for some elements of
the building, given the structure's unique geometry, and installation of the large
amount of glass on the building's exterior.
Useful Source See
a model of the finished Doudna Fine Arts Center by visiting www.predock.com/doudna.html
on the Internet.
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