Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
T2 Wins Prestigious Award
Architecture honor brings international acclaim
If you’ve ooh’ed and ahh’ed at the TheatreSquared building on the corner of West Avenue and Spring Street in Fayetteville, you are now in very prestigious company. The professional theater organization announced Oct. 8 that it has received the 2020 American Architecture Award, honoring the best new buildings designed and constructed by American architects in the U.S. and abroad.
“We are thrilled to see Northwest Arkansas’s theater recognized with this international distinction,” Executive Director Martin Miller said in a news release. “It is a credit to every community member who took part in this grassroots-driven process and to the amazing design and construction professionals who made this vision a reality.”
Designed by Marvel Architects with lead consultant and theater designer Charcoalblue — under the auspices of the Walton Family Foundation’s Design Excellence Program — the $31 million, 50,000-square-foot facility brings together two intimate theaters; education and community space; rehearsal and meeting areas; on-site workshops and storage for scenery, props and costumes; eight self-sufficient guest artist apartments; outdoor gathering spaces at three levels; and the open-all-day Commons Bar/Cafe. It opened to the public in September of 2019 with “Shakespeare in Love” as its first production.
The path to a new, permanent home for TheatreSquared began with a vision drafted by a group of community members and artists in March 2015:
“We see TheatreSquared as its own
center, a destination and a place of origin. We see a gathering place — a theatre commons — that is welcoming and fascinating, alive with activity. A place that invites, hints at the unusual, suggests something significant will happen here. And, in the beating heart of the building are brilliant performances, intimate and unmediated, celebrating the joys and struggles of what it means to be human. Here on this corner, we see a permanent home for remarkable theater, done well and with passion.”
Those goals had already been recognized on a national level. TheatreSquared was a recipient of an American Theatre Wing National Theatre Company Grant; the National Endowment for the Arts awarded T2 its “Our Town” grant, saying that TheatreSquared “demonstrates the best in creative community development”; and Architect Magazine dubbed it “a theater that lures the public inside.”
The building, its materials, and craftsmanship are an expression and celebration of Northwest Arkansas, T2 spokeswoman Joanna Sheehan Bell said in the Oct. 8 news release. The wood of the furniture, walls and floors were sourced from trees felled from the site, and local Ozark boulders were embedded into the landscaping. A limited material palette was used, giving priority to durability, flexibility and the building’s technical performance systems. Concrete provides a low-maintenance and durable finish intended to last for generations. The charring of the wood on the exterior creates a natural protective coating with an expected 50-year or longer lifetime. The materials work to create an efficient and sensible design where every space and material is used economically and purposefully.
“The 51,000-square-foot complex is an anchor to Fayetteville’s emerging Cultural Arts Corridor, which broke ground in Fayetteville in September 2020 and will transform the use of the West Avenue to a place of public engagement and recreation with worldclass award-winning design at the center,” Bell says.
Sponsored by The Chicago Athanaeum: Museum of Architecture And Design, the European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and Metropolitan Arts Press, the American Architecture Awards’ recipients will see their projects showcased in an exhibition format at the Athanaeum and published on the museum’s website and in a catalogue by Metropolitan Arts Press.