Sans brick, RIT’s new theater promises ‘respectful conversation’ with existing campus architecture

Considering Rochester Institute of Technology’s biggest annual event — Brick City Homecoming & Family Weekend — is named after the architectural look of the campus, it’s quite clear the ambiance of that red brick is very important.

But while the Belden brick blend made specially for RIT led to the nickname “Brick City” a half century ago, the school isn’t stuck in 1960s architecture. Hardly.

Recent additions to the built campus, including the ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute and the Student Hall for Exploration and Development (SHED), contain no brick but fit perfectly within the original design feel, according to RIT architect James Yarrington, director of planning and design services for the school.

The same will be true for the new music performance theater, which is under construction and features the work of renowned Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan. He is known for design of the Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles and Qaumajug, a museum in Winnipeg, Manitoba, dedicated to Indigenous art, along with a host of other projects.

Maltzan is the design architect for the theater and Rochester-based SWBR is the architect of record.

“When he visited our campus, it was clear to us he really understood the design-DNA of RIT right away,” Yarrington said. “He picked up on the very interesting movement systems as you go around campus and the dramatic aspects of the architecture.”

Which is why, though the theater will be light-colored and uniquely shaped — essentially a cube atop a base — the design concepts won’t clash, but instead blend in with the current buildings on campus, interacting with existing spaces and places.

“Michael was very sensitive to RIT’s original architecture; the movement systems, the public spaces, how climate affects your perception of all these spaces as you move through them,” Yarrington said.

“I was hoping for an architect who would embrace the fine points of the original campus and then use that as a springboard to the design, and that’s exactly what Michael did. My nightmare would be that we would have an architect that would spurn the original campus and just do something that was contextual in any way and just made its own statement.”

Renderings show the theater will look nothing like anything on campus now. Still, Maltzan’s design works well, Yarrington said, with what design architects from Roche-Dinkeloo and Edward Larrabee Barnes created in the 1950s and 1960s.

“I would call RIT an ensemble campus,” Yarrington said. “Some campuses — they’re independent buildings sitting with each other and they can be, and are, different styles. You’ll have a Georgian building and a Victorian building and Gothic building and Classic Revival building.

“RIT isn’t really like that. We need, I believe, things to be coordinated and to have a respectful conversation among the different architectural elements in the campus. But that doesn’t mean we stand still.”

Indeed, despite a rather popular perception, the school isn’t married to brick, and recent additions prove that.

“A lot of the buildings we’ve done over the last 20 years have really played off the original campus and also incorporated some newer architectural thinking,” he said. “Some of the new projects almost play off the campus like a foil. The SHED doesn’t have any brick — it has a generally curving, dynamic geometry — but it’s connecting two buildings that are very, very solidly brick.

“So, I don’t think when you walk in there you miss it. Similarly, the same is true for the music performance theater.”

Maltzan’s design itself will lure people to the theater, Yarrington believes.

“It engages the campus appropriately on different sides, given what’s going on,” he said. “The south side kind of defines the fourth side of a new campus quad. The north side is kind of a grand entry plaza and entry lobby. And then rotating above this, pretty dynamically, is the mass of the hall itself. And because it’s a preforming arts facility, this whole theater is quite tall, so it creates quite a mass that you have to manage.”

The theater is being built between the Institute Hall Building and the Golisano Institute for Sustainability on land that had been a parking lot.

“We continue to manage our parking needs,” Yarrington said, “but as Dr. (David) Munson (the RIT president) says, and with most U.S. universities, if you see a surface parking lot, it’s a potential building site.”

The theater will seat 750, landing in the middle in terms of capacity of the 500- and 1,000-seat facilities that exist in the region. Included are operational offices, support facilities and a rehearsal hall that will have the same size stage as the main hall.

A nearly century-old organ will also be part of the theater. A Barton organ from the old Hollywood Theater in Detroit has been pulled out of storage and is being restored for installation at RIT.

While the design is mostly finished, designers haven’t settled on the material for the exterior cladding system. Whatever the decision, rest assured it won’t be ordinary. For example, Maltzan’s museum in Winnipeg uses translucent stone that can be permeated by light.

“Michael likes to do unique exteriors,” Yarrington said, “he doesn’t like buying off the shelf.”

He does, however, believe architectural works of today should not only co-exist with the past but blend in perfectly.

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