Mesa Goes Artistic
New Arts Center Seen as Catalyst for Downtown
By K. Robert Wendel

Although long known as a sleepy bedroom community with a reputation for rolling up the sidewalks after dusk, city of Mesa officials are hoping a massive new arts center in the city core will spark a renaissance in downtown Mesa.

Construction on the $94 million project started in May 2002, with crews from Layton Construction, along with excavation contractor Buesing Corp. starting earthwork to move a total of 50,000 cu. yds. The 178,000-sq.-ft. center includes four theatres, with seating for 1,600, 550, 200 people, and a studio theatre, an arts education facility and an art galleries.

"This project will really transform the area and help spark the transformation of downtown Mesa," said Michael Tingley, a principal with Portland, Ore.-based design architects BOORA Architects Inc., the design consultant for Phoenix-based DWL Architects.

"We sincerely believe this project will help change the image of a bedroom community and add up to a transformation in the area's economic climate and create an attractive place to live."

Because Mesa's downtown lacks many large buildings, and in keeping with the city's urban planning, designers chose to break up the facilities into five different buildings clustered around a "shadow walk." The conceptual plan organizes the five buildings around a shady walkway defined by rows of trees and a waterway that mimics a monsoon's flash flood. High fabric canopies hung from the theaters punctuate the shadow walk, creating patterns of sun and shade to create an outdoor space useable year round. All of the theaters provide different venues.

"Each theater is designed for a different purpose," said Layton Construction vice manager Jeff Beecher. In the lyric theater that seats 1,600 there will be major performances and Broadway acts. The middle theater is more for plays and the children's theater is much smaller. The smallest is a black box theater."

Because the theaters and arts components are used at different times and days of the week, architects sited the buildings according to their frequency and type of usage.
Arts classrooms and a below-grade art gallery are located on the project's most prominent corner to draw pedestrians in from the street. The theaters, which are more destination-specific, sit farther back in the project in the middle of the block.

"Breaking up the project into multiple buildings allowed for a variety of ways for people to circulate through the project, and by separating them, it allowed each building to have its own opening and closing time to deal with security issues in a discreet way," Tingley said. "The theater building, which sees its busiest use during the weekend and on the evenings, is in the middle of the block, while the art studios are along the street edge to pull people in and enliven activity on the street."

The art studios that run along the street feature a total of nearly 50,000 sq. ft. of space, with plans calling for 14 studios for pottery, lapidary and other crafts, as well as space for dance and drama. Designers chose to submerge the 20,000-sq.-ft., future home of the Mesa Art Gallery below grade, creating space for a future sculpture park on the street level.

"If we built the museum above grade, it would have largely been a windowless building," Tingley said. "The sunlight here is so intense, you really don't want to allow much sunlight in because it could damage the art. We didn't want a big windowless building located at the most prominent corner of the site."

Architects looked at a variety of different building systems before settling on a cast-in-place concrete solution. Massive concrete walls are 18-in. thick at the base and taper upwards, with the largest theater featuring a 115-ft. wall to contain the scenery fly space. Acoustics were the primary factor in choosing to use concrete for the theaters, with architects deciding to use cast-in-place concrete for the rest of the project because of scales of economy and the availability of skilled concrete workers on site.

"This is not your typical project, so you really have to put an appropriate level of skill out there," said Tom Fogg, district manager for Ceco Concrete's Tempe office. "It's a difficult project and its not a high production job, but it's a challenge in terms of its difficulty to build."

The high walls created concerns about bracing because unlike conventional buildings that have the lateral floors to stabilize the walls, the theater is one vast open space, save for a cantilevered balcony and mezzanine.

"Part of the reason why the walls are so thick is that on one side, there is no floor tying in at all and the other wall doesn't have a floor until 70 ft.," said Marc Sokol, a project engineer with Phoenix-based Paragon Structural Design. "In a conventional building, you have floors every 10 for 15 ft. to add stability. Still, structurally, this is considered a slender wall because there aren't any floors in there."

Some walls had as many as 15 lifts, with 8-ft. of concrete in each lift. Using board forms, contractors created a texture on the concrete that mimics the grain of wood. The whole project calls for more than 21,000 cu. yds. of concrete for the buildings and another 3,5000 cu. yds. for site work and streetscape. On the fly towers, the concrete will be exposed, but the rest of the theaters will get one of four different colored concrete stucco coatings.

"We've built some big theaters, but there is really nothing like this out there," said Beecher. "It's very complex to layout and execute the concrete work, because really, you have five different projects here on an 8-acre site."

The arts complex will rely on a district central chilling and heating plant to supply treated air, with extra capacity for a proposed city aquatic center. Phoenix-based IMCOR is the mechanical contractor, with W.J. Maloney Plumbing acting as the plumbing contractor and Cannon & Wendt Electric providing the electrical work.

City officials expect that when the arts center project is complete, it will draw more than 2,000 people to downtown each day. The project also centralizes all of the city's artistic efforts as well as the administration of those efforts.

"This is just not a typical building," said Joe McCormack, a construction manager for Phoenix's Kitchell CEM, which acted as the owner's representative. "It's not a rectangle or a square, so the challenges and complexity really keep you on your feet."

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