Building the Future’s Arts Buildings

As an arts-facility planner whose teens are mobile-messaging, YouTubing, Ituning and 24/7 media engaged arts active kids, I can’t help but wonder about the vast divide in what we think arts facilities should be – most especially performing arts facilities – and what our kids will want them to be in the next ten years.

I’ve recently been facilitating some planning for a high school auditorium/performance center, and in the process have read hundreds of web posts from high schools all over the country planning new auditoria. In these searches, I keep looking for discussions of the ways kids learn and engage in the arts today – maybe not in class, but on their own – as a predicter of the arts facilities of the future. Its a whole different world out there, but the vast majority of high schools are still building performance halls for the band, orchestra, and high school musical.

Now, I love the band, orchestra, and musical side of arts learning as much as anyone could. But where are the sound-proof rehearsal spaces for the plugged in bands, the computer studios for the composers, or the film stages for the film programs? The editing studios? What about the black box theatres that also serve as the school television studio? For that matter, what about the small experimental theatre spaces, or the acoustically superb recital spaces? (There are more of these out there, to be sure, but still not that many…)

I’ve been reading Henry Jenkin’s report for the MacArthur Foundation, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, at the same time as thinking about arts facilities, and it is pretty provacative. Through the arts facility lens, Jenkins to me suggests we are living in two simultaneous zones. One zone is buildings (and teaching) that reinforce tradition. The other zone – which is where our kids are, right now – requires us to find new ways to enrich and transform arts learning facilities to match this amazing participatory culture that is no longer the future.