Architect, build manager picked for UA’s art site

$34M gallery project final piece of Windgate district

University of Arkansas trustees Thursday approved an architect and construction manager for a $34 million art gallery building described as completing the University of Arkansas Windgate Art and Design District.

The Windgate Galleries will be built between two other new structures, a four-level visual arts building under construction and a planned architecture design center.

The district area, roughly a city block in size and a few blocks from the main UA campus, is named after the Little Rock-based Windgate Foundation, which is providing gifts of $40 million and $30 million to the university in support of new arts facilities.

“The estimated $34 million project that’s funded by private gifts will complete the Windgate art district,” Ann Bordelon, UA’s vice chancellor for finance and administration, told the UA board of trustees.

The building will feature “professional-quality” galleries as well as an auditorium, Bordelon said.

Board documents described the project as helping the UA School of Art increase its “presence within the city and broader region, as envisioned by both the Windgate Foundation and Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation.”

In 2017, UA announced a $120 million gift from the family of Walmart founder Sam Walton, with the money mostly going toward expanding academic programs, hiring faculty members and boosting financial support for students.

Charles Robinson, UA’s interim chancellor, supported the Windgate Galleries project, according to a letter presented to trustees, but he was absent from the meeting held at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

Robinson was in Houston, Texas, after the death of his mother earlier in the week,

said Laura Jacobs, chief of staff for UA’s chancellor’s office, in an email.

Members of a board committee approved New Yorkbased Tod Williams Billie Tsien as the architect, working with Polk Stanley Wilcox, an architecture firm with offices in Fayetteville and Little Rock.

Tod Williams Billie Tsien is the firm designing the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s Jackson Park. Construction on the Obama project — described by The Associated Press as costing roughly $830 million, with funding coming from private donations — began earlier this year.

The UA board committee passed over the university’s top recommendation, the architecture firm Adjaye Associates working with Cooper Robertson.

Adjaye Associates is the firm founded by Sir David Adjaye — designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. — and has offices in Ghana, the United Kingdom and New York.

But the Adjaye Associates firm sought to work with another New York-based firm, Cooper Robertson, and the committee opted for an architecture team that included an Arkansas firm.

Before the committee’s vote, Ted Dickey, an investment fund manager and board trustees, said that he would vote against the Adjaye Associates team.

He stated that in-state companies are comprised of “families who send their students to our schools and use our doctors at hospitals, donate to our universities, pay taxes,” and he noted that two architecture teams were scored similarly by a selection committee.

The recommendation to the board was based on a ranking done earlier by 10 members of a UA selection committee, which included representatives from the UA School of Art as well as other campus officials.

As part of the ranking process, selection committee members were asked to rank five architecture teams from one to five, with one being the highest.

“It you take a look at the scoring system, one [architecture team] received six ‘ones,’ and one received four ‘ones,’” said Donald Bobbitt, UA System president. “That’s one point, and you could flip one vote and basically end up in a dead heat.”

Sheffield Nelson, a retired Little Rock attorney and board member, said “when it’s so close, that’s where we should look at things a little more closely.”

Dickey made a motion to select the Tod Williams Billie Tsien team, with the committee voting in favor without any opposition. The committee selected Clark Contractors, which has offices in Little Rock and Bentonville, to manage construction, which was UA’s top recommendation.

Bordelon told trustees that the talk about favoring an architecture team with an Arkansas firm was not a surprise.

“We’ve had this conversation internally ourselves,” Bordelon said, adding that the final choice made by trustees “is a very well-renowned architectural firm.”

She added: “I don’t think that we would be leaving this room thinking that we were defeated by any stretch of the imagination.”

In 2019, the trustees for Princeton University sued the Tod Williams Billie Tsien architecture firm over its work on a campus project, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. Major construction was completed in 2015, according to Princeton’s website.

The Princeton lawsuit claims that delays and other issues resulted in no less than $10.7 million in damages, with subconsultants later named as defendants and cross-claims filed in the case that remains pending in U.S. District Court in New Jersey. In court documents, the Tod Williams Billie Tsien firm has denied that any designs requiring additional work were the firm’s fault.

The architecture teams responded to a request for qualifications that described the Windgate Galleries project as having various components adding up to about 32,000 square feet.

The building is expected to have approximately 6,000 square feet of galleries that “will allow for museum loans, traveling exhibitions, and joint projects with Crystal Bridges of American Art,” according to the request for qualifications.

Various major components of the building are expected to include a 4,000-square-foot auditorium, a 6,000-squarefoot fabrication lab, and what’s referred to in the request for qualifications document as a 2,000-square-foot art and entrepreneurship lab “that promotes dialogue, discovery, and practice at the intersection of culture, commerce, and the civic sphere.”

Construction on the Windgate Galleries project is estimated to begin in February 2023, with the project completed in the summer of 2024.

It will be next to the Windgate Studio and Design Center, which is expected to open next fall, according to the request for qualifications document.