Facility Design: More than Bricks and Mortar
“The design and construction of a new cultural facility is a unique moment in the life of an arts organization or arts community. It’s a chance to rethink how arts and audiences connect, how works are produced, how thriving ecologies of innovation and meaningful experience are structured and sustained.”—Andrew Taylor, The Artful Manager
Space. Think about your organization’s for a moment. Does it inspire you to achieve the lofty goals of your mission? Are you and your constituents incarcerated or liberated by it? Does it invite creativity and connection? In the summer of 2004, the late Dirk Koning of Grand Rapids Community Media Center wrote in the Community Media Review about the need to reconsider how media arts organizations think about space. He challenged his colleagues not to see their spaces as solutions to problems, but rather as expressions of missions rooted in deeply held beliefs and visions for the future. How well does your facility hold up against this litmus test?
For three weeks this past spring, NAMAC hosted an online Salon dedicated to the evolving struggle to create media arts spaces that invite community while inspiring creativity. I served as moderator, guided by special guests Terry Boling (architect), Tom Borrup (Community and Cultural Development), K.C. Price (Ninth Street Independent Film Center), and Kenyatta Cheese (Eyebeam). The Salon ranged from the lofty ideas of mission-driven design to the nitty-gritty details of project manager qualifications. With over 60 participants, interests were diverse, covering exhibition, production, distribution, performance, multi-use centers, arts administration, archiving, new technologies, and community outreach.
Salon participants were engaged in all spectrums of the building process. Joanna Raczynska from Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center had recently been part of the build-out of a new combined arts space in Buffalo, NY. Kari Peterson from Davis Community Television in California was in the planning process with her board and “dreaming of a legacy, destination center that will inspire [their] community and service [her] community building mission.” Guest Kenyatta Cheese was literally putting finishing touches on Eyebeam’s new digs in New York City. Others, like Caitlin Berrigan from the Educational Video Center, were simply looking for ways to modify existing spaces to make them more inviting and livable.
Facility design within a mission-driven context is challenging, as Salon participants confirmed through their initial questions. How do we deliver high aesthetic environments on tight budgets? Is there a sane way to design for rapid technological change? What are the possibilities for recycling older buildings into new spaces for community and creativity? Are collaborative building projects worth the pain and additional management headaches? How do you create space that meets the multiple purposes and roles facing media arts organizations? How does an organization maneuver through the myriad details of a large building project without losing vision? How can we ever compete with the vast resources of mega commercial and entertainment media concerns?
Jay Brause, co-director of Out North (Anchorage, Alaska), shared the immense pressures to conform to the high design expectations of his community. He posted, “They want flash; they want new; they want things that look like they’re in an ‘important’ space. Or else an organization is seen as lacking. Creating ‘flash’ with a small capital budget is a challenge, and yet that’s what we’re trying to do.” Sherry Hocking from the Experimental Television Center also shared this concern. She stated, “We are interested in art and artists, and believe that art is messy and unpredictable. How do we accommodate that, within an environment which challenges prevailing aesthetic concepts? How do we provide appropriately scaled tools in an age of constant technological change and finite and limited resources?”
Tackling the question from a slightly different perspective, Andrea Grover from the Aurora Picture Show (Houston, TX), asked, “How can we design a facility that doesn’t conflict with our mission to provide an intimate, neighborhood-like, informal atmosphere for our patrons?”
Coupled with concerns about grand visions with limited resources, the conversation also explored the need for our spaces to serve many masters and be relevant to community and community-building processes. Rob Bodle posted that the Media Arts Center in San Diego uses its production van for their teen media program as a physical manifestation of its commitment to go to where the community is. Looking to its next facility, Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) hopes to fight institutional design pressures. Creating space that invites community while respecting production and work boundaries is the challenge Tracie Holder sees for MNN. Real Art Ways creates social space as a means to embed media exhibition in tactile experience. Real Art Ways director Will K. Wilkins indicated, “There is a lot of competition for attention, and it is only increasing. … While people can experience media in lots of ways, often solitary, there is no substitute for people connecting with people. If we can create a welcoming environment that encourages varied human connections in the context of art and ideas—well, then we offer something unique, and we matter.” Jay Brause observed that this connection to community is what makes social spaces such as churches so successful; as organizations, we need to link our individual buildings to larger social and community planning endeavors. This idea would surface later during Tom Borrup’s presentation. Several participants—Appalshop, MNN, Real Art Ways—were not only attempting to create new public spaces but commercial ones as well. Still, as Sherry Hocking stressed, there is the need to support spaces that are about process and not necessarily product. Others enforced the ideas that boundaries between public, private, and creative spaces are necessary, and clearly many of us are trying to do many things with too little space and not enough resources.
The first formal presentation of the Salon came from architect Terry Boling, who took on the challenge to create a new space for Media Bridges in Cincinnati that would mesh community space with a creative work environment. Boling stressed that the building of a new space is a serious endeavor for any organization. At Media Bridges, the building program came out of many hours of discussion about needs and vision by many of the major stakeholders. With the program in hand, researching and designing various possibilities takes place. In the case of Media Bridges, collaborative space was considered, but in the end a building was sought that would realize that organization’s mission.
Boling stated, “What I discovered about Media Bridges during the design phase was fascinating. …I found that their existing facility not only did not support their vision, but actually impeded it. Media Bridges was housed in a drab, windowless space, all hallways and doors. The space had no public connection and had no real spaces for communication. We realized immediately that designing for social interaction and public accessibility was crucial.” The Media Bridges project sought to create spaces that were sensual and technical. Open edit bays, translucent materials, rapidly morphing spaces, a studio of glass transformed into a black box with the swish of a curtain, training spaces with desks on wheels for easy reconfiguration, and open cable trays were all integrated into the design. In the end, Boling is proud to have designed a space that invites connection and social interaction while serving the needs for media production and distribution.
While some are fortunate to create new space, many media arts organizations are confronted by the challenge to rethink their role in the community, to expand what they are engaged in and mesh media with other pressing social concerns (such as youth development, community building, or cultural preservation). Tom Borrup, former director of Intermedia Arts, followed Terry Boling’s presentation with some thoughts on the role of media within our communities. “I believe that putting the media arts and media artists into their own facility is a disservice to the community and to the media arts. It creates a ghetto…based solely on transient technological tools.” Thinking of ways to integrate community and cultural space that have media arts as an element has the potential to expand partnerships and increase overall relevance for the practice. Borrup talked about the challenge to embed media arts practice into a range of community art and development activities. He also stressed the need to approach our buildings and spaces with a clear sense of what our organizations are about and what we see our futures being. Quite rapidly the spaces we create begin to shape who we are and will dictate how others interact with us.
Borrup noted, “For years I’ve been observing the explicit messages in the architecture of all kinds of arts and cultural organizations. You must be very clear on who you are and who you want to be before putting pen to paper in the design process.” One unexpected thought during this presentation was the idea that when organizations become landowners they owe something to their immediate neighborhood. Being a good neighbor is a moral obligation for those of us fortunate enough to own spaces. “If being an active local citizen is not something built into you or your organization’s matrix, you’ll find you need to acquire that software.” Michael Eisenmenger from Manhattan Neighborhood Network illustrated this point when he detailed MNN’s use of its space to meet the organizing and convening needs of small nonprofits that lacked congregating locations. As MNN embarks on a new space quest, the hope is to continue to embed the desire to support the needs of those in their community beyond a simple media mission.
As organizations expand their scope to address multiple concerns, the desire to collaborate with others to share the load becomes an attractive option. Collaborations around facility can have strong financial and programmatic benefits to organizations that embark upon such arrangements. Yet this path is not always a smooth one.
The Ninth Street Independent Film Center is one of the most notable examples of collaborative facility use with a media arts focus. Managing director K.C. Price shared his experiences with Salon participants from his unique perspective. While there are concrete benefits to sharing facilities, it is important to understand that like any partnership, the organizations sharing should have at least a decent amount of rapport with each other and be prepared for longer and more intense decision-making processes. Price did wonder if the Ninth Street model was a replicable one given the long relationships that the partner organizations had prior to owning together. Jay Brause stressed that Out North’s experience with partners in a shared space was not ideal, and Kenyatta Cheese from Eyebeam related a problem with a past partner taking too much control over the space. Price was clear that no matter the affinity of the groups involved, formal agreements and processes for dispute resolution is an absolute must.
As the Salon discussion moved to a formal teleconference, a subset of participants was able to discuss in greater depth issues of collaboration and serving multiple needs, along with some practical tips on building and design. In addition to continued discussion about collaboration pros and cons, some interesting ideas about creating flexible spaces were shared during this 90-minute conversation. Terry Lawlor from MNN indicated she had seen space that could be reconfigured and changed—for example, stadium seating that could fold up and create a large open room, or walls that could be moved around. Kenyatta Cheese indicated that when they designed the Eyebeam space they first looked at set needs (offices, classrooms, edit rooms) and then left the rest of the space pretty open (8,000 square feet in one section and 2,000 square feet in another). For these open spaces they concentrated on four things: power, cooling, conduit, and grid (to hang curtains and lights from). Each of these should serve the entire space in multiple configurations. Eisenmenger added that thinking about adjacencies and putting like things together with collapsible walls (such as classrooms) could add to flexibility. Carl Kucharski from Portland Community Media added a word of caution that sometimes we seek to be too responsive and may be changing too much, thus loosing focus on our core activities by focusing on too many community needs.
As the Salon drew to a close, it was clear from all that facility is never as simple as bricks and mortar. The occasional reference to online environments and electronic archiving during the gathering also reminded us that soon vast new frontiers of virtual space will be confronting us. While no easy 10-step process to building a great facility emerged from the Salon, a time to reflect, step back, and connect around facility did. It is clear that the as a field we are demanding more and more out of our organizations and as such our spaces are feeling the crunch. Changing technology, expanding roles, and intertwined relationships with others in our community are pushing all of us to think long and hard about what we want from our physical (and virtual) environments. And still the need to create, connect, and share the world via media remains, as do the constraints of financial and human resources.
FELICIA M. SULLIVAN, via Forge Consulting, promotes open communication networks within community environments. Her current work—using media to link local endeavors to regional and national community capacity-building—is centered in Lowell, MA.
© 2005 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
