AIA Citation Award 2018: Freeman Performing Arts Center

PROJECT: Freeman Performing Arts Center
FIRM: University of Arkansas Community Design Center
LOCATION: Freeman, South Dakota 

The Freeman Performing Arts Center in South Dakota marks the threshold between prairie and civic life. This small agricultural community of 1,300 has an outsized Anabaptist music tradition recognized nationally. The 37,000-SF two-theater hall unifies a miscellaneous collection of public buildings and landscapes at the southwest corner of the town’s one-mile grid. The center’s massing projects an ascending system of familiar gable roofs which absorb the fly tower into a composition reflective of the region’s pragmatic building traditions. The prairie facade is a translucent curtain wall that illuminates the entire interior massing—a beacon for miles on the prairie. A thru-porch celebrates transitions between the prairie’s agricultural landscape and the intimate gathering space of the building’s entrance plaza on the east side. The intimacy of the east elevation stems from its articulated window systems and charred wood cladding. The arts center’s economy and singularity yield a compelling icon for Freeman, not unlike the disciplined beauty of regional agricultural structures dotting the prairie.

The center’s hall organization is defined by a common ceiling capturing programmatic boxes— recital hall, courtyard and concessions/box office—lining the approach to the theater. Translucent walls, clerestory windows, and an interior courtyard create a spatially rich and warm interior, important in this northern climate. The courtyard expands the lobby’s gathering area during favorable weather while bringing natural light and nature into what will become the community’s primary interior public space. The lobby and its courtyard offer a year-round venue for multiple community uses outside of scheduled shows.

The Freeman Center’s two performance spaces– the recital hall and theater– are warm interiors with wood surfaces. The theater seats 568 in a continental seating plan facing a proscenium stage. The room is acoustically modeled for musical theater requiring longer reverberation times than stages for speech. Wood wall and ceiling panels are convex shapes to ensure the spread reflection of sound, supported by sound diffusing surfaces of the wainscot.

Conversely, the recital hall seats 155 and sponsors more flexibility in its interior environment. The stage’s back glass wall can be opened to the courtyard for informal outdoor performances or social gatherings, in effect creating a traverse stage with audiences on two sides. The courtyard can also be screened from the stage with roll-down acoustic shades for more formal performances. The recital hall’s clerestory windows admit natural light while the room’s articulated ceiling is showcased to the lobby and porch, overcoming the homogeneous black box effect imposed on small performance spaces.

The proposal unlocks new synergies with the adjacent boarding school specializing in music and performance, the Heritage Hall Museum and Archives and the Freeman Prairie Arboretum. The center’s site planning provides a new gateway porch and plaza for the museum, while strengthening connections between Main Street and the Freeman Prairie Arboretum. Equally important, the center structures an identity and a sense of arrival into town through pragmatic solutions to the building program. The center aims to be a fitting architecture for both the scale of the prairie and the town’s unique cultural traditions.

PROJECT TEAM
Stephen Luoni, Assoc. AIA
Jeff Hazard, AIA
Stacey McMahan, AIA
Jessica Hester, AIA
Jonathan Martinez, Assoc. AIA
Raheel Ahmad, Assoc. AIA
Dr. Francisco Mejias Villatoro
David Marroquin Juarez
Maranda Gerga, Intern
Linda Komlos, Administrative Analyst

See more profiles from the 2018 AIA Arkansas Design Awards.