Wofford College: Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts

  • 04/01/18
Wofford College

PHOTOS © 2017 DERRICK SIMPSON–MCMILLAN PAZDAN SMITH ARCHITECTURE

Wofford College’s Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts is designed to enhance the student experience of a private liberal arts campus while serving the larger community from the edge of downtown Spartanburg, SC. McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture designed the 60,000-square-foot facility to house academic programs in theatre arts, visual arts, and art history, as well as a museum home for Wofford’s permanent collection.

Floor-to-ceiling glazing fills the art studios with natural light, creates openness, and connects with the outdoors. Two custom-made glass sculptures by internationally renowned artist Dale Chihuly grace both the campus entrance lobby and the public entrance lobby, creating an inspired atmosphere for the student gallery, performance hall, and permanent museum spaces. An outdoor sculpture garden and the artistic material choices of white brick and cast stone, metal with copper tones, and glass set the building off from the traditional architecture of the campus.

The 325-seat performance hall features a 2,600-square-foot stage with high-performance theatrical lighting, rigging, and audiovisual systems. Acoustic performance was studied through detailed angle-measurement models and is controlled by a highly adjustable acoustic baffle system. The adjacent 100-seat black box theater features a custom suspension grid and serves as a laboratory for set lighting design education. Dressing rooms, additional seminar classrooms, faculty offices, a costume design studio, and a scenery construction woodshop support the theaters’ purpose as a “teaching theater.”

Housed in the same facility, the college’s newly launched Studio Art program is sized to accommodate 20-25 students at easels or drawing benches. The adjacent Ceramics Studio includes large work tables, potters’ wheels, and a kiln on the shared covered porch. Attention to fumes in the studios and temperature and humidity in the museum and art storage spaces required intense air quality protocols throughout the facility, including numerous dedicated units, tightly managed control systems, and careful attention to off-gassing of materials.

This article originally appeared in the College Planning & Management April 2018 issue of Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Springfield Breaks Ground on $53.7M Pipkin Middle School Rebuild

    Construction is underway on a new, state-of-the-art Pipkin Middle School in Springfield, Mo., a major step in Springfield Public Schools’ (SPS) long-term facility improvement plan, according to local news. The $53.7-million project officially broke ground in early June, following years of planning and community input aimed at modernizing aging infrastructure and addressing student capacity concerns.

  • Key Considerations for Office-to-Higher-Education Facility Conversions

    Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, office-to-alternative-use conversions have become a recurring subject of urban development discourse. Office utilization rates across major U.S. cities remain below 50%, with vacancy rates exceeding 27% in San Francisco and 16% in New York. Higher education facilities present programmatic and spatial use cases that align readily with the typical characteristics of commercial office buildings.

  • i-PRO, NovoTrax Partner for New School Emergency Response Solution

    i-PRO Americas, Inc., which manufactures edge computing cameras, recently announced a partnership with NovoTrax, provider of end-to-end life safety and mass notification solutions, to address gaps in emergency response workflows at K–12 schools, according to a news release.

  • K–12 Safety Trends Report Reveals Reliance on Training, Technology

    Wearable safety technology provider CENTEGIX recently released its 2025 School Safety Trends Report, according to a news release. The report is based on more than 265,000 incidents during the 2024–25 school year as reported through the CENTEGIX Safety Platform, used by more than 800 school districts across the U.S.

Digital Edition