Construction will begin next summer on the University of Colorado at Boulder's new Visual Arts Complex, which will synthesize art, history and high technology to create a new hub for creative expression.
Scheduled to open in 2009, the 148,000-square-foot complex will be the new home of the CU Art Museum and the art and art history department, a cross-disciplinary program ranked among the finest in the nation.
"This will be one of the most interesting and significant buildings on the campus," said Graham Oddie, who is associate dean for arts and humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences and oversees both programs. "It will be used heavily by the many students who study art at all levels, but also the wider public who will now have better access to the Colorado Collection and other exhibitions. It is going to transform the center of campus."
The award-winning architectural firm of Kallmann, McKinnell and Wood, based in Boston, and OZ Architecture and M.A. Mortenson Co., both based in Denver, will design and build the $56 million structure.
Lisa Tamiris Becker, director of the CU Art Museum, said the new complex would be a cultural gateway for the entire state of Colorado, and create a dynamic new home for the museum's permanent Colorado Collection, a significant array of more than 5,000 works of art.
The well-regarded collection was started in 1939 and includes art from various eras representing Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe.
Currently, the museum is located in the aging Sibell-Wolle Fine Arts Building, which will be leveled to make room for the new complex. The museum's new space will feature climate-controlled exhibition and storage spaces, permanent and changing exhibition galleries, a 200-seat auditorium for lectures and public symposia, a collection study center and an educational workshop.
"It will be a crossroads of the artistic and the intellectual, and will underscore for students and others the lifelong benefits of critical thinking when viewing or creating art and in other realms of our lives," Tamiris Becker said. "Winston Churchill said it best, 'We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.'"
Meanwhile, the new complex will enable art and art history students and faculty to work in studio suites and classrooms with natural light, and access a visual resources center featuring a digital image database containing some 350,000 slides. The facility also will include student exhibition spaces and the latest high-tech teaching technologies facilitated by wireless and wired Internet access throughout the building.
"We are excited about the possibilities that will unfold as students and faculty explore art in all its forms in an environment that supports innovation and evolution," said Garrison Roots, who chairs the art and art history department.
The Visual Arts Complex will be the fourth major CU-Boulder project to be funded in part by an unprecedented plan that mandated additional student fees to subsidize critically needed new buildings. Student leaders conceived of the plan in 2004 to make up for a shortfall in state funding.
So far, student fees have contributed to the construction of a new law building, a business school extension, and a new home for the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society or ATLAS, which opened this fall. A major component of the plan called for the new buildings to feature green technologies geared toward the conservation of resources.
In April 2004, the CU student government approved a bill to assess full-time students with a fee that will finance about half of the Visual Arts Complex's construction over a 20-year period.
The complex, whose naming rights are up for bid, also is being built with state, university and private donor funds.