New Tempe Arts Space Targets Locals

The Tempe Center for the Arts was designed to fill a niche in the Tempe community.

While there were larger venues such as Gammage Auditorium at Arizona State University for major touring Broadway shows, there wasn't adequate space for resident Tempe performing groups or visual artists.

But there will be in the new $65.7 million arts center and surrounding park, which were funded in full with revenue from a sales tax approved by Tempe voters in 2000.

"It was really important for us to design and use the space for the people who are paying for it," said Jody Ulich, cultural services director for the city of Tempe.

Construction of the 88,000-sq.-ft. structure is scheduled to be complete by the end of the year, but specialized rigging, sound and electronics installation will take place for several months beyond that.

The project includes a 600-seat performance hall with four seating levels and a smaller 200-seat studio theater. "You can configure the studio theater in many different ways - we really wanted this to be whatever people wanted it to be," Ulich said.

Local arts organizations such as the Tempe Symphony Orchestra, Childsplay and the Tempe Little Theater are expected to be frequent users of both venues.

While the center sits on a dramatic site next to Tempe Town Lake overlooking a part of Papago Park and "A" Mountain, there was a downside: The site west of Mill Avenue used to be a landfill.

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Crews led by project manager Kitchell CEM of Phoenix began removing and replacing the soil around most of the site in April of 2003. Tempe-based Okland Construction Co. joined the project later as general contractor.

Architects Barton Myers Associates of Los Angeles and Tempe-based Architekton came up with a unique circular design. "This is the first circular plan that we've done," said Peter Rutti, senior associate with Barton Myers.

With the theaters arranged along a central lobby space, support spaces such as dressing rooms and restrooms needed to be placed as close as possible, so the idea was to have them wrap around the theaters in a circular shape, Rutti said.

However, within the circle most of the interior walls are still arranged in a standard square grid pattern. Wherever the grid-aligned walls met the circular outer wall, they inevitably formed odd-shaped triangular rooms. "We carefully planned the rooms so any that could have a different shape, such as a storage room, all occur in those little triangular spaces," Rutti added. "We didn't want to break the orthogonal because it does increase costs with your mechanical systems, gypsum board and steel studs."

The 20-ft.-high concrete perimeter wall defines the circular shape of the building and is tapered from 3 ft. thick at floor level to just 1 ft. at the top.

"We were limited in how many ties we could put in our formwork due to the radiuses and curves," said Alan Collier, vice president of Okland Construction. "It made the concrete challenging to stay tight and true, especially when you don't have any 90-degree corners to work off of."

Most of the project's concrete, masonry and steel will remain exposed as part of a "naked building" concept. As a consequence, crews needed to embed the electrical conduit within the concrete walls to minimize any visual distraction from the architectural impact.

"Since all the concrete was exposed we wanted it all to have the same color, so we had to buy it from the same plants and have it prepared the same way," Collier said. This meant only straight-bag mixes with no fly ash because the color can vary with the time of year.

Rinker Materials was the ready-mix concrete supplier on the project.

One of the project's most dramatic concrete features is a radiused dome that tops the 600-seat theater. Originally designed to utilize precast panels, it was decided through value engineering that cast-in-place concrete would be cheaper and more constructible, Collier said.

"We used information from three-dimensional graphical computer renderings to have the concrete forms built by a specialty fiberglass company," he added. "Vernon Monger, our project general manager, spent days and nights working on all the geometries."

Monger temporarily installed a system of glue-laminated beams and set the fiberglass forms on top. The concrete for the dome was done in one continuous pour.

The sculptural shed roof provides a dramatic icon for Tempe's skyline, but the pipe trusses comprising its structure required precision fabrication and welding.

"Each truss is unique," Collier said. "For example, the top trusses are all different sizes, but the deck all has to be the same elevation."

The perimeter trusses have connection plates coming off of them at various angles that all tie into the upper tower steel trusses. In addition, the roof design included long trenches, called fissures, which will mimic a canyon wash during rainstorms.

"There are seven main fissure trusses made from pipe cut at various angles," >> said Mark Fultz, operations manager at Able Steel, the Phoenix-based steel fabricator on the project. Some are over 100-ft. long, from which secondary pipe trusses splinter off in various angles.

"We had to change some of our tooling, fabrication and welding processes in order to accommodate this," Fultz added.

The fabricator utilized a three-dimensional plotting program that allowed it to unravel the complex angles in order to formulate the cutting patterns for the steel, Rutti said. Many cuts were so complicated they had to be done by hand, he added.

"It was like building a spider web out of steel," Ulich said. Top Flite Construction of Phoenix was the steel erector on the project.

Surrounding the facility is a 17-acre park with an amphitheater and a 5,700-sq.-ft. sculpture garden.

Other facilities inside the center include a 3,500-sq.-ft. visual art gallery, catering facilities, a lounge and a 3,400-sq.-ft. multipurpose meeting room with floor-to-ceiling windows. The room overlooks a negative-edge reflecting pool that visually blends into Tempe Town Lake.

"We are hoping that people will come here for other reasons, discover the space and then come back to be patrons," Ulich said. "Performing arts spaces don't make money, but in order to minimize subsidies as much as possible, we need to maximize all of our spaces that can be sold when not in use."