All In for Drama

What did I do today? Mostly I did today what I was supposed to do yesterday: myself and several other CFA people did a space planning exercise for a new building. It looked a little like this...


The poker chips are each 10 sq ft of space. Yesterday we spent a very long time trying to decide how many of what color chips should be part of the effort. Today in a blizzard of activity toward the end we placed the chips to look at spacing and adjacency.

That first shot was the third basement. It's mostly practice rooms, but also a bunch of shop space. Afterward I was all like "I let down all the tech people... we got the basement." But there was really no way it was going to come out any other way seeing what had to be in the building.


It doesn't look like it, but this is even more shop space and the footprint of two new venues. It's also the second basement, but on one side of the building that's actually open to grade. These shops are the brainchild of Art, Arch, Design, and Drama and the theatres are Art, Music, and Drama.

With a dozen people around the table placing items concurrently you had to work quick and have an agenda or the next time you looked the space would be gone.


So what's in the building? Well, really nothing at this point. It still isn't a building. Right now its an argument for a building. So what's in the argument?

For everyone there are performance and exhibition spaces, all intended to be flexible use. There are meeting rooms, classrooms and rehearsal spaces. There are cooperative shop spaces with carpentry and metals, electrics, and a machine shop as well as a large (albeit subterranean) paint pace, and I think there's a fairly big space for a sign shop. Topping out that list are three large multimedia clusters.

So that's nice.


What's in the argument for Drama? Well to begin with everything above is mixed use, collaborative space. So Drama has access to all of it. In addition to that we carved out space for additional faculty and adjunct offices, grad student studio space, individual practice rooms, and a soft goods shop which could be for goods or costume overflow.


We had an outdoor performance venue on our list, but since it didn't occupy any internal square footage it kind of disappeared today. That doesn't mean it might not come back later - really it should.


The working group was my boss and the other school heads, the incoming and interim dean, and a couple of faculty. So really I was "low man" in the exercise. Probably I had WAY too much to say over the two days. I kept asking if I should disappear a little but never got any prompting to do so. Still it makes me wonder how much noise I would have had to make to get more prominent placement of the support spaces.


The next step is for the facilitators to compare our mosaics to the program we'd developed earlier. All things being equal we shouldn't have had any more or less tiles than we needed, but that doesn't make sure we created as many usable spaces as we were supposed to. Then they need to look at circulation patterns and secondary volumes like staircases, elevators, bathrooms and the like.


Originally we were supposed to do the tile thing four times. For a bunch of reasons we spent a lot of our time doing other things and only did the exercise once. In hindsight I kinda wish we'd been able to do a couple of iterations. There's a social element to the thing that takes a while to settle in and it comes out in the allocation. I think if we did it again I would spend less time talking to people about the requirements of performance spaces and more time gathering turf with windows.

Still: 50 student spaces, 2 theatres, paint space, machine shop, sign shop, soft good shop, CAD clusters... coulda come out worse.

I wonder if we'll build it.