Sparkling new Bard performing arts center takes off

Architect made use of every penny

By Rebecca Rothbaum
Poughkeepsie Journal

With its intimations of mutability, it is an appropriate exterior for a multi-purpose arts building with a music hall that can, through the arrangement of a movable concert shell, accommodate everything from chamber music to opera.

Achieving such multi-functionality -- the one, overriding requirement for the new home of the college's dance and theater departments and its annual summer music festival -- was also the project's central challenge, its architect, Frank Gehry, said.

''How do you get that much stuff for that little money,'' was actually how he put it, although Gehry admitted that, by both the college's and most people's standards, $62 million is not a drop in the bucket. (The lion's share of it was donated by Richard Fisher, the college trustee for whom the building is named, as well as James Ottoway and Martin and Toni Sosnoff.)

Still, it was a tight budget for a 170,000-square-foot building with a suite of offices, studios, a professionally-outfitted black-box theater and a 900-seat hall, which has a 55-foot-tall fly-tower that allows for scenery changes.

Gehry, who rose to international prominence in 1997 with his striking design for the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, responded by focusing on the performance spaces and keeping the frills to a minimum.

''It's very professional,'' Gehry said. ''The theater has all the stuff the Met does, not as grand as the Met does, but it is possible to have a full orchestra and opera there.''

Inside, the concrete pillars that rise through the lobby are unadorned, the skeleton of the ceiling exposed, the lighting retail. Even the walls of the lyre-shaped auditorium are bare concrete, save for a filigree of Douglas fir, the same wood used for the upholstered benches and movable towers of the concert shell.

Make client happy

Lee Ferris/Poughkeepsie Journal The stage of the Bard Performing Arts Center's main theater is sanded in preparation of applying final finish on April 1. The 900 seat theater has an 80' x 40' stage complete with a full fly system.

A campus building, it is ''rough and ready and didn't have to to be fancy,'' Gehry said. ''It took some freedom with the finishes.''

The result connects two wings -- one academic and one public -- at an expansive backstage area, allowing for simultaneous uses. The entire structure is blanketed under folds of steel that both evoke stage curtains and echo the irregular profile of the Catskills to its west.

Nicholas Adams, a professor of architectural history at Vassar College, who authored an article about the Fisher Center for the May issue of the Italian design magazine Casabella, hailed the building as the region's first important work of architecture in decades and predicted it would become a ''classic Hudson Valley view.''

''His buildings are really actively involved in their environment, they don't simply mimic the surrounding landscape but actually engage it,'' he said in a phone interview.

In this way, Adams added, the Fisher center is characteristic Gehry: ''This is a building that doesn't slink into itself. It stands up.''

Gehry said he worked closely with Leon Botstein, who is not only Bard's president but also a conductor.

With acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, Gehry said he strove to create the perfect acoustics so important to Botstein. He has said the sound in the new hall is so excellent his musicians will have to retrain their ears to play there.

Such praise is music to Gehry, who said, ''the most important thing is to make the client happy."

Relevant Web link: More coverage of the Fisher Center for Performing Arts is available at http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/projects/bard_center