Posted Oct 21, 2018, 10:44 PM
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FYHA
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Houston - Wichita, KS
Posts: 3,101
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https://www.papercitymag.com/culture...l-arts/#169894
Quote:
Inside Houston’s New $88 Million Showcase School
How HSPVA’s New Downtown Campus is Designed to Bring the Arts Together — and Be Flash Mob Friendly
BY ANNIE GALLAY // 10.16.18
HISD has set the stage for the students of the Kinder High School for Performing and Visual Arts with the school’s expansive new campus set to open in January. Things will be grand when they’re downtown in these brand new digs.
The sleek, innovative and minimalist campus comes in at 168,000 square feet, more than double the size of the existing high school in Montrose. You can say this education and performance space, designed by Gensler’s Houston office, will steal the scene. The architects have it down to a fine art.
The new campus will take up an entire 1.32-acre block downtown. And it should — unlike the 37-year old original campus, this one’s designed to be spacious enough for a growing number of students. The original building was constructed back when the high school for the performing arts only spanned three years, not four.
It wasn’t too easy for the building to absorb the incoming freshman classes when all that changed.
This new campus was designed for HSPVA’s 750 students, with some flexibility in case that number grows. These students run the gamut of visual and performing arts, from music to theater, writing, dance and art, and they need a pretty specific setup in order to thrive.
Think an $88.3-million project to fund the building of five performance spaces, gallery space for studio art students, dance studios, a recording studio, a ceramics studio, sound-proofed practice rooms, a print-making lab, a creative writing wing and more. The largest performance space, Denney Theater, can seat 800.
“We’re actually going to help bring the next-level institution to their learning,” Gensler architect Terry Newell tells PaperCity.
To satisfy creative types, you’ve got to think creatively. And that’s just what Newell did.
“A lot of the finishes are kind of raw and modern,” the architect says. “Polished concrete, blank white walls, simple finishes. And a lot of that is to allow the students to express themselves.”
Newell calls the five-story, vertical building a living canvas, a blank palette.
“What we enjoyed about that was allowing the students to treat their own space as a studio and make it their own,” he says.
The Denney Theater is the heart of the new campus, holding roughly 20 performances each academic year. The theater itself pays homage to the University of Houston’s Moores Opera House, where HSPVA students have performed for years.
Having the theater as the core of the whole building way key for Newell.
“The vertical arrangement of the building was going to be unique for a high school campus,” he says. “Typically, you’re looking at two or three or four buildings sprawled out with parking lots around it.
“This one wanted to be a good neighbor to the theater district downtown. It’s situated in a full city block. It’s almost like a Jenga puzzle around this central main theater.”
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