GREENSBORO — H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture plays a starring role in performing arts centers around the country.
Founded by renowned architect Hugh Hardy, the New York firm and its two predecessors have designed dozens of arts venues over five decades.
In the past two years alone, H3 has produced an award-winning black-box performance space atop New York’s Lincoln Center Theatre, a new building at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a Brooklyn home for the Theatre for a New Audience.
“The performing arts are kind of the backbone of our practice,” H3 partner Geoff Lynch said from its Manhattan office.
He had just returned from Colorado Springs, where H3 plans a visual and performing arts center at the University of Colorado.
Soon Lynch will come to Greensboro, where H3 will apply its talents to the planned $65 million Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts.
H3 rose to the top when a community task force pondered a list of potential designers.
Hardy firms have tackled such high-profile projects as renovations at Radio City Music Hall, New Amsterdam Theatre and New Victory Theater in New York.
“There’s not a firm in the last 50 years that has had more involvement with building performing arts centers,” said Walker Sanders, president of the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, which is partnering with the city on the project.
Tanger Center planners aim to open it in mid- to late 2016 on land bordered by North Elm and East Lindsay streets and Summit Avenue. It will connect to the planned Carolyn and Maurice LeBauer City Park.
Greensboro Coliseum Director Matt Brown, who will manage the Tanger Center, is preparing contracts to be reviewed by the City Council and a committee of private donors, who have pledged more than $35 million to the project, Sanders said. The council expects to consider the design contract in May.
Once H3 receives a contract, it will dive into design details.
Lynch came to Greensboro in October 2012 for a public work session called a charrette. H3 drew on public feedback to create preliminary ideas.
They envision a building of about 100,000 square feet, with a 3,000-seat theater to host touring Broadway shows, concerts and comedians, and local events including Greensboro Symphony concerts.
To Lynch and H3 project architect Mercedes Armillas, it represents more than a theater.
“By working on these buildings,” Lynch said, “you feel that you are not just creating a great place for a show, but that you are building a great community, building lively streets, building downtown, adding restaurants and street life to neighborhoods.”
He and Armillas point to the transformation of the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Hardy and H3 have done work over nearly 25 years.
“There’s a nightlife, there are new restaurants, there is activity on the street, there are cultural events all over,” Armillas said.
In 2012, the Brooklyn Academy of Music opened the Hardy-designed Richard B. Fisher Building. The seven-story, $50 million building includes a 250-seat auditorium, rehearsal studio, classrooms, green roof garden and offices.
Then last fall, Theatre for a New Audience opened its $40 million Polonsky Shakespeare Center nearby, with a 299-seat Elizabethan courtyard-style theater for Shakespeare and classic drama.
“It has flexibility to support six or seven stage and seating configurations, which means that for a smallish theater like ours, we are not locked into one configuration,” Managing Director Dorothy Ryan said.
Its subscriber base has tripled. “There is typically a ‘honeymoon’ when you open a new facility because everyone wants to see it,” Ryan said by email. “So I don’t know if these numbers will be sustained, but we are off to a very good start.”
Lincoln Center in Manhattan long has bustled with performing arts and patrons. But it lacked a small theater for emerging playwrights and more intimate performances.
H3 designed the 112-seat Claire Tow Theatre complex to sit above Vivian Beaumont Theatre — literally. The $42 million project won a state award from the American Institute of Architects.
They didn’t build it directly on the roof.
“It was like creating a bridge, almost, above the existing building,” Armillas said. “It was quite an interesting challenge to do that in the middle of New York City.”
The Tanger Center’s challenges are not quite as dramatic.
Its requirements “are very much a combination of many other projects,” Armillas said. “It doesn’t fit any one mold but is more of a hybrid of so much that we have done in the past.”
They want to create a building that will promote activity all day, not just for a few hours at night.
The lobby’s design will be key to the building’s success, Lynch said. He envisions a glass wall opening onto a three-story lobby that can be used for corporate and school events, educational activities and parties.
“We want it to be not just a great place to walk into a half-hour before the show, or have a drink at intermission,” Lynch said. “It will be this great public place and an indoor-outdoor space, so that outdoor space and the lobby feel like one place.”
A giant video screen on the building’s exterior could project indoor performances. An exterior plaza could be used for festivals.
Inside will be the 3,000-seat theater, with some seats removable to accommodate smaller audiences and certain events.
Seats will be divided among the orchestra or main level, a grand tier or lower balcony and a balcony.
The sight lines need to allow patrons who watch a symphony concert, a lecture, a Broadway or comedy show to “feel like they are close to the stage,” Lynch said.
“Finding ways to make this hall very flexible, that can be transformed in a night or just a few days … will be one of the challenges,” he added.
H3 will collaborate with other theatrical, acoustical, engineering, architectural, construction, cost estimating and landscaping companies — and with designers for LeBauer Park.
“We look forward to getting started,” Lynch said.
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