envelopeA+D was one of 6 Bay Area firms invited to participate in a design competition for a eductational, cultural and performing arts center in Emeryville.

DISTRIBUTED ART + PERFORMANCE

Distributed art + performance installations proliferate arts content into the community while casting the city itself as an arts destination. These installations are devices to focus and showcase ECA’s arts programing in venues well beyond the center’s walls. Dispersing art, art education, and performance venues throughout the city generates a rich cultural landscape that engages people on an everyday basis.

The polycentric nature of the city of Emeryville, with centers or clusters of people inhabiting distinctly different programmed zones throughout the city, preferences a strategy of distributed art center components, located in and between the various centers of the city. A matrix of distributed arts sites encourages engaged exploration of the city, of discovery through wandering. A distributed art center changes the perception as well as the identity of the city itself.

Distributed art + performance installations reinforce, rather than supplant, the potency of the mission of the art center. By dispersing arts content into the polycenters of the city, these satellites point back to the center, reinforcing its message and its relevance and establishing a unique identity for the ECA. These installations are intended to be deployed as both precursor and ongoing constructions to create a matrix of engagement sites in a range of scales throughout the city.

Precursor installations provide fundraising opportunities that serve to cement relationships with corporate and individual underwriters. These initial projects will cast the ECA’s relationship with the public in an exciting and compelling manner: connecting the art center to its constituencies where they live, play and work. Moreover, precursor installations create locations for eca programming to occur before the building is completed, allowing for the eca to grow into its primary site in the heart of the civic center.

PERFORATED CIVIC CENTER SITE

With the distributed network, art + performance proliferates throughout the city as an open arts construct. This construct emanates from the building leading to the notion of an open or perforated site. The perimeter walls of the existing building are perforated to create a large entry that opens up to the corner of Park and Hollis and provides multiple access points around the building. The perforated site both collects and disburses visitors throughout the site and actively sponsors art + performance throughout the site. With this, the site is activated on the parking lot side with a large scale backdrop/screen and stage fronting a new public square, placing art + performance at the center of the public realm. On the south side of the site, a new roof shroud architecturally organizes the light filtering, life safety and mechanical systems within its skin and acts on the urban scale to present a large scale video installation to the Big Box side of the site. At the pedestrian level, the existing windows and shed structure at the corner of Hollis and 40th are opened up for a suite of window galleries, creating opportunities to present the work of the artist-in-residence to the community.

OVERLAPPING PROGRAMS

Our approach to program and internal operations is to weave together overlapping program elements, which create an energetic, collective space between more defined programs. These overlapping program spaces tie back to the idea of the distributed art + performance network where art experiences happen simultaneously with everyday life. These overlapping program clusters create a mutable in-between space fostering interconnections and exchange, which will change through each day. This occurs most clearly within the Interior Courtyard, where café, bar, seating and stage elements mix with the changing flow of people to and through the site. Moreover, within the Art Education / Artist-In-Residence cluster, a pocket stage and built-in stadium seating zone creates a vibrant space in-between which magnifies the possibilities for openness and exchange between these program elements. These overlapping program clusters work to create communal spaces where people can get together across boundaries in relation to the making and the experience of art.

All three of these concepts: network, perforation and overlapped program operate to dissolve barriers to the engagement of art + performance in people’s lives at every scale: city, civic center, building, room and chair.

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Presentation Slideshow - Presented to the ECA selection committee

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Press

San Francisco Chronicle - September 28, 2010

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