A project team that included the designer BOKA Powell and general contractor McCarthy Building Companies recently completed the 55,000-sf Noble Family Performing Arts Center on the Midway campus of Parish Episcopal School in North Dallas.
That same team was involved in another of this school’s expansions, the 24,000-sf Gene E. Phillips Activity Center, which opened for the 2017-2018 school year.
The private Parish Episcopal School celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Since 2002 it has owned and operated out of what once was ExxonMobil’s Pei Cobb Freed-designed corporate headquarters. The school currently has about 1,200 Pre-K through 12th-grade students and 150 faculty. Its new Performing Arts Center “will play a pivotal role as we celebrate our history and launch a future of limitless possibilities for our students,” said Dave Monaco, Allen Meyer Family Head of School, in a prepared statement.
DESIGN CONTINUITY
The new facility consists of various spaces that include a 515-seat performance hall whose chamber is more than 50 ft tall. A Black Box theater has an audience capacity of 120. The facility features a music hall, rehearsal rooms, and a film screening room. The back-of-house spaces include a scene shop, dressing rooms with a tailoring shop, storage areas, offices, and a storm shelter. A Gallery Space displays works by students and visiting artists.
Parish Episcopal School engaged BOKA Powell—which provided architecture and interior design services—to envision a new building in keeping with the campus’ existing style. During construction, which began in November 2019, McCarthy deployed BIM models, laser scans of the slab, and aerial images, according to the firm’s region president Joe Jourvenal.
The Performing Arts Center connects to existing buildings and incorporates many of the same materials. Pre-cast concrete panels are arranged in a rhythmic pattern to capture the sunlight in a theatrical manner as a reinterpretation of the dramatic north light of the existing Great Hall vault. A grand entrance welcomes guests into a naturally lit lobby.
The completed project has optimized acoustics and a control room with the latest light and sound equipment.
The performing arts center is named in honor of the three children of Natalie and Scott Noble, who invested $3.7 million in the school’s “Limitless” fundraising campaign.
Click here for a short virtual tour of the new building.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Curtain rises on Broadway's first green theater
The Durst Organization and Bank of America have opened New York's first LEED-certified theater, the 1,055-seat Henry Miller's Theatre. Located inside the new 55-story Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park, the 50,000-sf theater is located behind the preserved and restored neo-Georgian façade of the original 1918 theater.
| Aug 11, 2010
Restoration gives new life to New Formalism icon
The $30 million upgrade, restoration, and expansion of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles was completed by the team of Rios Clementi Hale Studios (architect), Harley Ellis Devereaux (executive architect/MEP), KPFF (structural engineer), and Taisei Construction (GC). Work on the Welton Becket-designed 1967 complex included an overhaul of the auditorium, lighting, and acoustics.
| Aug 11, 2010
Gold Award: Eisenhower Theater, Washington, D.C.
The Eisenhower Theater in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., opened in 1971. By the turn of the century, after three-plus decades of heavy use, the 1,142-seat box-within-a-box playhouse on the Potomac was starting to show its age. Poor lighting and tired, worn finishes created a gloomy atmosphere.
| Aug 11, 2010
Giants 300 University Report
University construction spending is 13% higher than a year ago—mostly for residence halls and infrastructure on public campuses—and is expected to slip less than 5% over the next two years. However, the value of starts dropped about 10% in recent months and will not return to the 2007–08 peak for about two years.
| Aug 11, 2010
Bowing to Tradition
As the home to Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals—the oldest theatrical company in the nation—12 Holyoke Street had its share of opening nights. In April 2002, however, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences decided the 1888 Georgian Revival building no longer met the needs of the company and hired Boston-based architect Leers Weinzapfel Associates to design a more contemporary facility.
| Aug 11, 2010
Team Tames Impossible Site
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the nation's oldest technology university, has long prided itself on its state-of-the-art design and engineering curriculum. Several years ago, to call attention to its equally estimable media and performing arts programs, RPI commissioned British architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw to design the Curtis R.
| Aug 11, 2010
Silver Award: Hanna Theatre, Cleveland, Ohio
Between February 1921 and November 1922 five theaters opened along a short stretch of Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland, all of them presenting silent movies, legitimate theater, and vaudeville. During the Great Depression, several of the theaters in the unofficial “Playhouse Square” converted to movie theaters, but they all fell into a death spiral after World War II.
| Aug 11, 2010
Biograph Theater
Located in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, Victory Gardens Theater Company has welcomed up-and-coming playwrights for 33 years. In 2004, the company expanded its campus with the purchase of the Biograph Theater for its new main stage. Built in 1914, the theater was one of the city's oldest remaining neighborhood movie houses, and it was part of Chicago's gangster lore: in 1934, John Dillin...
| Aug 11, 2010
Platinum Award: Reviving Oakland's Uptown Showstopper
The story of the Fox Oakland Theater is like that of so many movie palaces of the early 20th century. Built in 1928 based on a Middle Eastern-influenced design by architect Charles Peter Weeks and engineer William Peyton Day, the 3,400-seat cinema flourished until the mid-1960s, when the trend toward smaller multiplex theaters took its toll on the Fox Oakland.
