The Rochester Art Center | Rochester | Minnesota | HGA

The Rochester Art Center unfolds in two architectural volumes linked by a glass lobby that frames views of downtown Rochester and the Zumbro River. The Tower block serves as the structural anchor for the cantilevered, three-story Art Box gallery wing, which appears to float over a glass lobby and the river. The Zumbro River Gardens surround the building with foliage, creating a serene setting for visitors.......more

Temporary Art Hall Berlin | PIERRE JORGE GONZALEZ / JUDITH HAASE / ATELIER ARCHITECTURE and SCENOGRAPHY

Parallel to the art market boom and the surge of blockbuster exhibitions, contemporary art centres of numerous European art metropolises increasingly understand themselves as places for critical realism and utopistic inclusion. In the light of intensified social polarisation and the growing relevance of creativity as a mean of intercultural and economic productivity, those art centres claim to open artistic processes of production and reception to all kind of social groupings......more

The Rich Mix Arts Centre | London | Penoyre And Prasad

The Rich Mix is an exciting new arts centre, which brings together a diversity of cultures and creative disciplines. It celebrates the contribution made by successive generations of immigrants to the economic and cultural life of London. To create a home for this innovative project, we extended and transformed a derelict factory building in East London.

The centre includes a three-screen cinema, performance and exhibition spaces, music studios, workspaces for creative businesses, a rooftop function room and a cafe. The cinema is housed in a distinctive extension to the rear of building, clad in sky-reflecting aluminium.....more

Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture | Charlotte, North Carolina | Freelon

LOCATION: Charlotte, NC
PROJECT SIZE: 46,500 SQ FT
PROJECT COST: $18,800,000

The Gantt Center celebrates contributions of African Americans to our nation's culture and serves as a vital resource in Charlotte for music, dance, theater, visual and film arts, arts education, literature and community outreach.

The four-story facility is located in the heart of Charlotte’s downtown cultural district. Flanked by new mixed-use development and the Charlotte Convention Center, the Gantt building is also a close neighbor to the new Bechtler and Mint Museums and the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The facility includes highly flexible space for exhibitions, presentations, receptions/events and retail.

Situated on a narrow 50’ by 400’ tract of land, the Gantt Center site presented the additional challenge of positioning the building above car and truck access ramps that lead to below grade parking for the Wells Fargo Tower. The dynamic subsurface vehicular activity and the exaggerated linear proportions of the site provided a great opportunity for a powerful architectural response to the building’s program and physical context.

Research into the site revealed that this area of Charlotte’s urban core, the historic Brooklyn neighborhood, was originally a thriving African American community that was slowly displaced during the 1960s by the post-segregation expansion of the central business district. The Center takes design inspiration from the Myers School that was located nearby. The school's prominent exterior staircases inspired its byname - “Jacob’s Ladder School.” This historic reference became one of the guiding ideas for the Gantt Center's design.

The Center’s stairs and escalators, together with the articulation of the central atrium, pay tribute to “Jacob’s Ladder”, linking the building to its historic context and to African American culture. Functionally, elevating the main lobby to the second floor allowed the truck and car ramps to enter the site without interrupting the logical flow of the building's interior space.

The exterior façade of the Center is inspired by African textile designs and African American quilting patterns. Perforated metal panels are “stitched” together by diagonal steel channels. The assembly forms a rain screen with windows provided in areas needing daylight. The pattern continues on the north side of the building, which will eventually abut future development. In place of windows, the north façade is accented with strip lighting....more

PROJECT AWARDS:
2010 AIA NC Honor Award (State)
2007 AIA NC Honor Award, Unbuilt (State)
2007 AIA Triangle Honor Award, Unbuilt (Local) CREDITS:
Design Architect/Architect of Record: The Freelon Group
Associate Architect: Neighboring Concepts
Photography: (1) Alan Karchmer (2-6) Mark Herboth

The Glasshouse: Arts Conference and Entertainment Centre | New South Wales, Australia |Tonkin Zulaikha Greer

Two large timber forms appear to float within the glass ‘skirt’ that defines the building’s perimeter, one housing the regional art gallery and the other the sumptuous 600 seat theatre. This box-in-a-box strategy is a familiar one in contemporary performing arts venues, where an outer façade provides weather protection. An interstitial space between external envelope and black-box theatre becomes foyer and circulation, a place for the audience to promenade and be on show. TZG has deployed this strategy before for the remarkable Carriageworks (2006) project. While the theatres at Carriageworks are sheer off-form white concrete set against a patina of brickwork and cast-iron, the rich inner shell of ship-lapped local timbers here contrasts sharply with the cool glass façade. In this sense the building is akin to Jean Nouvel’s Culture and Congress Centre in Lucerne – albeit at a more modest scale....more at ADR

Tadao Ando | Chateau Lacoste Arts Center | France

Japanese architect Tadao Ando is the master planner of a new Arts Center in the south of France, commissioned by Irish property developer Paddy McKillen.
The arts center currently under construction is located at the Chateau Lacoste winery in Aix-en-Provence also includes structures designed by leading architects: Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Renzo Piano.

Ando drafted the art center’s master plan and designed its 3,000-square-meter (32,000 square
feet) main gallery. 'We're creating a space filled with water and the gallery will appear
to float on top of it,' he mentioned in an interview last year by Bloomberg.
The location holds special meaning because 'Aix-en-Provence is the home of Paul Cezanne, the father of contemporary art.'

The arts center, which is due to open next year, features a music room designed by Gehry
and a wine cellar by Nouvel, and other structures by Piano and Foster, all pritzker laureates.
-Designboom

Herzog and de Meuron | TEA -Tenerife Arts Center| Santa Cruz de Tenerife ,Canary Islands, Spain

More pictures here

Site Area: 8,800 square meters
Building Footprint: 7,753 square meters
Gross Floor Area: 20,600 square meters

Completed: 2008

Client: Cabildo Insular de Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
Architects: Herzog & de Meuron

“The building typology of our design for the Tenerife Arts Center is based on courtyards. The elongated courtyards are important in many ways, providing daylight, views and orientation for the visitors and users of the museum spaces and the library.
One of them, between the office and museum wings of the arts center is planted with typical plants of the Island.
From the very beginning of the design process we operated with courtyards, also because we wanted to connect the new arts center typologically with its existing neighbour building, the Antiguo Hospital Civil which has recently been transformed into the Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre. However it took a while before we understood that all different activities and functions of the arts center should be assembled under one continuous roof structure rather than break down into individual wings.
This is also one of the reasons why the elongated courtyards do not appear like embraced exterior spaces but rather like interior spaces that are being left open. The spatial interplay between inside and outside of the art center integrates rather than separates the very diverse urban landscapes which are so fascinating in Santa Cruz.”
Herzog & de Meuron (1999-2008)

Via

Photographs:Duccio Malagamba

The Source Arts Centre and Library | Tipperary, Ireland | Mccullough Mulvin

Thurles Art Centre and Library stands on a critical site in the centre of Thurles, Co. Tipperary beside the town bridge which leads into the triangular-shaped Liberty Square. On the opposite bank is one of the medieval tower houses which give the town its strong character. The scheme incorporates a new library, an art centre and a 240 seat theatre in one building; each function is expressed as a volume under an undulating roof open towards the river onto a generous boardwalk. The building’s geometries arise out of its very particular location, crouched like a cat at the medieval gate of Thurles and stretched around a bend in the river Suir. A folded roof encloses very different volumes, rising and falling like a small mountain range from a strong base; two storeys of library and research space are coupled to the high volume of the auditorium by the lower entrance and arts space. Folded between these peaks

of activity is an upper terrace, focus of daytime community activity and an evening bar/café. In plan the building is similarly cranked, each zone mapped into trapezoidal volumes which master the bend of the river. In the library, a deep cut in the ceiling plane right through the research floor brings light and air to the centre of the plan. The exhibition space has a similar rooflight sitting across the upper terrace, giving unexpected views of the work on exhibition below. Shielded behind the monolithic concrete entrance wall, the introverted, reflective, exhibition space can be glimpsed through a porthole when arriving, or alternatively closed off for hanging. The theatre foyer is similarly a compressed volume – vertical this time – caught between auditorium and boardwalk. Large glass doors slide back to open the café and foyer to the boardwalk, and from the upper foyer the audience expands out on to the upper terrace overlooking the town.

Text and images from :Mccullough Mulvin

OCA (Palace of the Arts) | São Paulo, Brasil | Oscar Niemeyer

Building for events and cultural expositions in the shape of indian house.
Oscar Niemeyer although associated primarily with his major masterpiece,Brasilia, the capital city of Brasil, he had acieved early recognition from one of his mentors, Le Corbusier,going on to collaborate with him on one of the most important symbolic structures in the world, the United Nation Headquarters(Citation from the PRITZKER PRIZE JURY).
OCA was completed in 1954.

Paulo Mendes da Rocha da Fundação and a team of consultants in 1998 were responsible to undertake the restoration works on the building to commemorate 500 years of Brasil Discovery.
Architecture :Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Angelo Bucci, Fernando de Mello Franco, Marta Moreira and Milton Braga

Collaborators :Martin Hernan Franco Pecci, Keila Costa and Maria Isabel Imbronito

Structural:Puleo Bentes e Engenharia de Estruturas S / C Ltda

Eléctrical and hydraulic Installation:MBM Serviços de Engenharia S / C Ltda
Photos:Nelson Kon

Letterkenny Arts Centre|Mac Gabhann Architects

New arts centre and theatre in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal for Donegal County Council. 2005 - 2007.

West Cork Arts Centre,Skibbereen,Ireland | Tighe Architecture

Texts and images from:Tighe Architecture