Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center

The Center’s students engage in an arts-based core curriculum, which includes dance, music, and theatrical productions. Attentive to the requirements of autistic pupils, we designed comfortable spaces for flexible learning in a light-toned color palette and developed acoustic systems that aid those with sound sensitivity. The different rooms accommodate multiple purposes: production coordination, stage craft, or dressing rooms. A flexible classroom can be used for teaching in the morning, rehearsal by afternoon, and as a green room by night.

Influenced by concepts of music and movement, the Center may appear from the outside as a minimalist collection of rectangular masses, but inside contains warm and inviting performance space. AUX Architecture built subtle changeability and variation into the design without producing an overstimulating or distracting learning environment. A semi-translucent façade brings natural light into the new addition during the day, while preserving students’ privacy. In the evening when the Center is use for performances, interior illumination allows the polycarbonate curtain walls (made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic) to glow welcomingly. A pattern of columns behind the façade produce a rhythmic interplay of light and shadow.

The inspiration for this approach comes from the Martha Graham’s Lamentation (1930), a choreographic piece in which a dancer struggles within a cocoon-like garment—a metaphor for the challenges many people with Autism experience every day. AUX Architecture translated the dancer’s gestures of compression and expansion into the angled plans of the entry hall, primary stair, and box office lobby.

The project diverted an estimated 100 metric tons of waste from landfills, avoided 0.166 million KgCo-e emissions, and is 35% lower embodied carbon than new construction.