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