Boston Performing Arts Center

Year / 2013
Location / Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Building Type / Performing Arts Center
Building Area / 123,350 sf
Status / GSD Project
Advisor / Eric Höweler

This project challenges the boundary that exists  in ticketed venues. A performing arts center inherently creates a rift between those who can experience performance and those who cannot. A community performance center should be available for the community in its entirety. Thus, the building must become an experience of performance instead of the expression of the exclusive performance hall.

    The site, already a park, demands as small a footprint as possible to keep the waterfront accessible. However, when stacking such a complex set of programs, they inherently become detached and non-urban. Instead of stacking, one plate on the next, the building is organized in a “townhouse” scheme. This allows each program to establish a connection with the ground, producing multiple front doors and symbiotic interconnections. 

    Typically, this typology is dominated by the demands of the performance hall. To transform this type into something other than the expression of the hall, I began with packing all the program into a cube with each cluster maintaining a connection to the ground. The “street” is then allowed to push into and through the building, stopping at each face of the “cube” and framing a city view. Interconnected, these “stages” each act like a public space, creating a mixing chamber for programmatic opposites that is ultimately a-typical, thus heightening the senses and becoming a performance itself. As a result of this burrowing, the original cube unravels into several recognizable fragments, creating multiple openings and a blurred interior/exterior relationship that spills both into the park and back into the building. The monument unravels into the landscape, humanizing it. It is accessible, iconic, functional, communal, contextual and didactic. It is an architecture full of statements.