project: Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts
space: New Academic Building
owner: Dallas Independent School District
location: Dallas, Texas
architect: Allied Works Architecture | Booziotis & Company Architects
Overview
Opened in 1922, Washington High School was Dallas' first secondary high school to serve the black student population. In the 1950's, the school was re-designated as a Technical School, and in 1976 the school was re-designated yet again as the School District's Arts Magnet School and named Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing & Visual Arts. Over the years, the school outgrew the original school building and underwent various renovations and additions, leaving the school visually disjointed, dated, and despite expansions, still overcrowded. Due to these factors and significant infrastructure deterioration, it was decided to build an entirely new facility in conjunction with a preservation and renovation of the original historic 1922 school building. The National Endowment of the Arts funded a design competition with Allied Works Architecture winning the competition with an architectural design that led to the project being one of the premier arts education institutions in the United States. This $55 million project consisted of a new Academic Building with classroom and performance spaces, a renovation of the historic 1922 building with a new blackbox theatre and art gallery space, and a new 475 seat proscenium style Theatre.
Theatre Consulting & Design
Encore Design Group was selected as the theatre consultant for all phases of the project. In the Academic Building, we provided consulting and design of all classroom performance spaces. This includes Dance Movement Studios, Choral Classroom, Lighting Lab, Cafeteria, and the outdoor amphitheatre style performance space known as the "Green Room".
Movement Studios
The facility contains a number of Movement Studios for dance. The largest of the studios being a nearly 4,000 sq. ft. two-and-a-half story studio that is divisible into three separate studios by way of large retractable acoustical dividing walls. We provided consulting for the permanent sprung dance floors, and design of the theatrical pipe grid system over the entire space, performance lighting, and performance sound systems. The pipe grid in these studios allow for very flexible stage lighting dimmed via distributed IGBT style dimming as well as the hanging of various draperies and loudspeakers. The large movement studio has a control booth on the upper level that overlooks the studio containing controls for both sound and lighting. The movement studios has also been provided tielines to and from the Montgomery Arts Theatre and Recording Studio.
Green Room Amphitheatre
The school has a long held tradition of both scheduled and random performances in the courtyard of their previous facility. Continuing this tradition, a more formal outdoor performance space, named decades ago as the "Green Room" by the school, was provided in the center of the new facility. Being in the center of the facility, other spaces such as the Cafeteria in the new building, the Gallery in the historic building, and the new Montgomery Arts theatre all overlook this beautiful outdoor space. A stage is provided along the glass wall of the Cafeteria with tiered seating up to the historic school building that sits higher in elevation. We provided consulting and design within this space including sightline studies, two large, permanent lighting trees for stage lighting, as well as power and cabling infrastructure for portable lighting and sound equipment. For some performances, followspots may be used in this space by locating them in the windows of the Blackbox Theatre, high above on the second floor of the historic building.
Cafeteria - A Performance Space
Being a school for the Arts, we weren't surprised that the Owner had a desire to have the new Cafeteria designed as a potential performance space. The 3,500 sq. ft. Cafeteria was designed with the large center section of the room being over two stories tall and was provided a full theatrical pipe grid over the high space. The pipe grid contains a number of distributed dimming lighting circuits as well as loudspeakers that may be moved around the pipe grid as needed. At the floor level, DMX and Sound connections are provided for control from various locations within the room and a sprung, yet resilient permanent dancefloor was installed. The south wall of the Cafteria is glass with a full view of the outdoor "Green Room," the wall created the outdoor space's upstage wall.