In 1971, the Government Services Building in Boston, MA by Paul Rudolph was technically completed - but not completed to the extent that the architect had envisioned. For various reasons, one entire wing of the building was never built. The space of this unfinished wing is the site for this project: a performing arts center, meant to bolster the potential of this spatially incredible but otherwise underdeveloped site.
The spaces of a modern performing arts center are roughly divided into three categories - generally accessible areas outside of the interior of the performance space, the interior space of the theater itself, and non-generally accessible areas that serve the performance spaces and the public areas. Here, the required performance spaces of this center - a two thousand seat auditorium, a black box theater and a practice stage - are linked together into a single, subdivided tube that is served by a single common back-of-house, including dressing rooms, a stage shop, and meeting rooms. Publicly accessible areas intertwine with the performance and back-of-house spaces. From one side of the building, the sealed performance space is visible from the outside as an opaque mass. From the other, the back-of-house and public areas are transparent and visible from a new urban park.
From a larger site point of view, the mass of the performing arts center completes the larger mass of the entire complex, and the orientation of visible spaces focuses attention on the interior void of the site, now occuiped by a single green space instead of subdivided concrete paths. Linking the three performance spaces creates a unique venue for artistic productions unavailable by other means - the space can house two productions at once, or the entire space can by opened up into one long tube. No matter the configuration of the production, the theater spaces are connected to the same service spaces.
The public lobby is divided into three main areas - one for the auditorium, one for the black box theater, and one upper lobby that links the two together. This ensures that the public is allowed to permeate throughout the building instead of being confined to one area. The entire south side of the center is able to be opened up to the park, exposing the normally hidden inner workings of the stage shop - and an additional outdoor stage looks out onto the park for public performances.
