by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a private school performing arts center that doubles as a community arts venue?

Summary: The Murray Arts Center on the campus of Mount Paran Christian School functions as a performance arts venue for the school and for the surrounding community. To serve both of these communities simultaneously, it separates programs by floor level and contains flexible, multipurpose performance facilities. WSDG designed the facilities’ acoustic systems, and Randall-Paulson Architects worked on the building’s overall design, in a contextual, relaxed Collegiate Gothic style.

The new Murray Arts Center in suburban Atlanta is a multipurpose theater for multiple audiences designed by Randall-Paulson Architects and acoustics experts Walters-Storyk Design Group (WSDG). As the newest addition to the Mount Paran Christian School campus, the 84,000-square-foot building will be the school’s primary performing arts venue as well as a public performance hall for Marietta, Ga., and the surrounding Atlanta suburbs.

The project originally began with a donation by philanthropist Don Dozier, one of Mount Paran’s primary benefactors to establish a community arts center that could also be used by the school. Dozier hired Randall-Paulson in 2003 for the project, after they had just completed an entirely new pre-kindergarten through 12th grade campus for Mount Paran. Originally, the project they envisioned was much simpler and smaller—40,000 square feet at the most. But as it doubled in size and more technical and acoustic demands were placed on what was to become a regional education, performance, and recording facility, it came time to add on to the design team.

“[Dozier’s] vision was bigger than what the local community may have been involved with,” says John Carruth, AIA, an associate with Atlanta-based Randall-Paulson. So, during the schematic design phase, they brought Highland, N.Y.-based WSDG on board to handle acoustic and musical performance design issues. John Storyk, AIA, a founding partner of WSDG, says their work with Randall-Paulson was intensely collaborative.

High School Gothic
Mount Paran Christian School sits on a 65-acre campus with a 7-acre lake that many of the buildings, including the Murray Arts Center, huddle around. The style of the campus and of the wholly contextual Arts Center can be described as Suburban Collegiate Gothic Lite—a less rule-governed and imposing version of this dour sensibility that has been adapted to the free-form curving streets and cul de sacs that lie beyond the city grid. Some literal religious design gestures remain, like arched windows and tall gables that resemble church steeples, but the strict symmetrical rationality of the Gothic church is mostly gone. The Murray Arts Center is clad in red brick with precast concrete detailing. The building’s base is made of simulated limestone.

Carruth says he was able to work the dual school and community uses into the building’s design by separating programs by floor level. The first floor houses education and rehearsal spaces. It’s the most heavily trafficked room and therefore the most accessible to students, as they’ll use its choral, instrumental, and practice rooms every day.

The Arts Center’s second floor contains the building’s primary performance spaces: the 600-seat Kristi Lynn Theater and a 2,200-square-foot black box theater. The two are linked by a 5,000-square-foot grand lobby, with Italian marble flooring, golden chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a processional staircase, among other things that remind visitors and student that they’re not in a typical high school auditorium. This lobby can double as a performance space or an event space and features a catering kitchen off to the side. Because these performance halls and their lobby are public amenities, they have an elevated separate entrance at grade for the public.

The Kristi Lynn Theater, a proscenium-style hall, offers multipurpose flexibility. Its default setting is as an orchestra hall, though a completely flyable orchestra shell allows it to be converted to other uses. From a proscenium or orchestra setting, giant doors open to reveal speakers for films or electronically amplified music. “It has to do four different functions that are not always happy with each other,” says Storyk. The auditorium’s ceiling is lined with wood clouds that control and dampen the room’s acoustics. Still, the project has a modest budget: $35 million in total.

The top floor of the Arts Center contains recording studios and administration spaces. These studios have two functions: to capture and mix performances within the building (all performance and rehearsal spaces are wired for recording) and to function as educational or conventional commercial recording studios.

Musical magnet school
The school and its architects hope the Murray Arts Center, open since December 2007, will become a draw for the community as well as for students interested in studying the performing arts, and are adopting public magnet school models of specialized schools with a wide geographic draw.

“They can develop a curriculum that is really based around the performing arts and create a niche in the private school market,” says Carruth.