Woodruff OKs ASO concert hall site as part of 25-year master plan

In the course of scuttling plans for architect Santiago Calatrava’s fanciful $300 million Symphony Center design for 14th Street, the Woodruff Arts Center has created a 25-year master plan that aspires to give the Midtown center a 21st century makeover.

Late Wednesday afternoon, the Woodruff’s executive committee unanimously approved this “road map for the future,” which would not only move the proposed concert hall to the Woodruff campus, at the corner of Peachtree and 15th streets, but also afford the Alliance Theatre a Peachtree entrance.

At first blush, it might appear a hurried retrenchment from the cumulative “wow” that greeted Spanish designer Calatrava’s vision in 2005. But the push to define a broader vision for the entire Woodruff complex started just a year later, almost from the moment attorney and arts supporter Joe Bankoff became arts center president and CEO.

Bankoff led the Woodruff’s divisions through 14 months of strategic planning, attempting to answer two questions: What does the future look like? What does success look like?

Adopted in May 2008, the strategic plan sparked the master planning process. “We studied the strategic plan as a starting point versus the master plan leading the strategy, which is a mistake,” said Cousins Properties president and CEO Larry Gellerstedt, who led the center’s planning team. “We were looking at where does the center want to go, and what are the physical needs that come out of that.”

Master plan

The master plan by Boston-based Sasaki Associates arrives with no architect, time frame or budget attached to the concert hall or other improvements. But Bankoff believes it will lead to “facilities that will enable excellence in art, and in education” and make the arts center a seven-day-a-week beehive of activity.

It’s a much overdue updating of the 1950s model of “large temples to culture,” Bankoff believes, of which the twice-facelifted Memorial Arts Building is a textbook example. The arts center of the future, he said, will boast spaces that are “just as important as the event itself.”

The master plan calls for the Memorial Arts Building, which opened in 1968, to be dismantled or have its space reconfigured or renovated, and be replaced by four free-standing, but connected, buildings surrounding an expansive pedestrian plaza that would extend to the Peachtree sidewalk. Those structures are the new Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert hall, the Alliance expansion, the Alliance auditorium and the current Symphony Hall, to be renovated and used for arts and education functions or rental.

The big piece, of course, is a new hall for the ASO, which would face Peachtree and run along 15th Street, with lower and upper lobbies opening out on to the streets.

A connection into the current Symphony Hall basement will allow the orchestra to continue to use a warren of practice and equipment rooms, trimming the build-out of the replacement hall by as much as 30 percent.

Calatrava, the acclaimed architect now based in Zurich, acknowledged Tuesday that he has bowed out of the project, declining to compete in an another design competition. But Sasaki Associates principal Alan Ward said the master plan “leaves enormous room for expressive architecture” for the concert hall.

Phase II

In a second phase, the Alliance Theatre’s Peachtree expansion would be developed from space on the northeast side of the Memorial Arts Building. Though the building would give the Alliance a Peachtree address and frontage prized by Atlanta commercial developers for decades, much of the expansion would be committed to educational space used by all four of the Woodruff’s divisions: the Alliance, ASO, High Museum and Young Audiences.

“In our strategic planning, education has moved from an activity that is critically important … to something we viewed as core to the mission,” Bankoff said.

With that mission in mind, Woodruff leaders have initiated conversations with Atlanta Public Schools and MARTA about the possibility of building an arts magnet school or music conservatory atop the MARTA Arts Center station. Though MARTA controls the space above the station, Sasaki included the proposed public school in its master plan model.

The heightened role for education fits not only with the arts center’s plans for the future, but expands the idea of the Woodruff as a “Village for the Arts” that’s as active during the day as on performance nights. That notion was seeded by Italian architect-planner Renzo Piano with his 2005 High Museum expansion that enlivened the campus with two reasonably scaled exhibition buildings opening out on to a plaza (as well as a tucked-back administrative building).

The village idea encourages pedestrian use, including mass transit to reach the arts center, via ample walkways extending from the rail station up to Peachtree and between the arts center’s various buildings. Adding to that flavor: a plaza-side cafe and coffee stand(s).

“We’re trying to create an intensity of activity that makes it better to walk rather than driving into a drop-off,” planner Ward said.

The new buildings for the ASO and Alliance fit with the Blueprint Midtown directive to court the pedestrian by building to the street, including outdoor public spaces and inviting people inside via retail and other activity.

Alliance Theatre managing director Thomas Pechar said, “While this is all still very early in the planning process, we are extremely excited about the opportunity the master plan affords to create a more dynamic environment for the theater. … We are keenly interested in plan proposals that include the possibility of having a Peachtree storefront entrance and the potential for new education facilities surrounding the walk to the Alliance stage doors.”

ASO hall time frame?

While building the new ASO hall is clearly the Woodruff’s priority, Bankoff was vague on a time frame.

He said donors who had pledged $114 million to the 14th Street site were “uniformly” on board with the move to the Woodruff campus. However, Penny McPhee, president of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, with the lead pledge of $35 million, said until a design for the new site is created, “we remain in a ‘wait and see’ mode.”

Beyond allowing that he would form a capital expansion committee from the Woodruff board, Bankoff said he was “not ready to speculate” on when fund-raising would be revived.

Once the economy recovers, the Woodruff will likely seek to sell the 14th Street land on which Calatrava’s design, featuring a pair of hydraulic steel “wings” folded over the glass atrium that would open during ASO concerts, was to have been built.

“It will help to support part of our ambition here,” Bankoff said of the Woodruff campus.