The programs of the Herberger College of Fine Arts soon may have a unified place to call home – a 439,000-square-foot space that would mirror its reputation as a national leader in the arts. In 2006, ASU hopes to break ground on the 13-acre Arts and Business Gateway District, a mixed-use center on the northwestern corner of the Tempe campus. Approval of funding for the project at the January 2005 meeting of the Arizona Board of Regents would set this major building project in motion.

As planned the Arts and Business Gateway will consolidate the academic and artistic programs of the college, and provide performance and exhibition space. It will offer an environment rich with creativity and potential.The district also will house the W.P. Carey School of Business, expanded space for the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, a conference center with hotel, a grocery store and other retail space, market-rate housing units and additional parking.

Currently, fine arts programs are housed in 25 different buildings on and off campus, making difficult a key tenet of the Herberger experience: collaborative discovery between fine arts disciplines.

"Gathering places and connecting spaces in the new complex will bring students and faculty from our programs and others together,” said Linda Essig, newly appointed Department of Theatre chair.

"I think the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary conversations and opportunities to meet sans agenda will have a tremendously positive impact on us all.”
In addition to unifying the college’s faculty, staff and students, the new space also will be designed to meet the very specific technical requirements for teaching, research and creative activity in art, dance, music, theatre and media arts.

"By and large, the college now is housed in inadequate, outdated, inappropriate, and sometimes just plain dreadful space,” Herberger College Dean J. Robert Wills said. "There are even spaces where faculty and students need to use flashlights because of inadequate lighting.”

Wills says an even bigger problem the new center will help solve is a sheer lack of space. “There is simply not enough current space to house faculty, graduate students, classes, laboratories and studios, and administrative support services.”

The School of Art, for example, will gain enough additional space to accommodate 200 to 250 graduate students in its highly ranked MFA and Ph.D. programs – twice as many as it now is able to accept, said its director, Jon Sharer.

It also will be able to add a research component to its photography and printmaking programs.

The Department of Theatre will gain student production space, a media lab for instruction and creative activity in the area of performance technology, meeting space, faculty and graduate student offices, and space for its library, which currently is inaccessible because of space limitations.

According to School of Music Director Wayne Bailey, that organization will gain two concert halls to help handle the more than 600 concerts it stages annually. Acousticians will be called in to help design the halls, as well as appropriate band, orchestra and choir rehearsal rooms.

The Department of Dance’s anticipated state-of-the-art spaces are certain to increase the college’s ability to recruit and retain top students and faculty, forecasts interim Chair Bonnie Eckard. She expects the dance technology program especially to benefit. “New theatres and studios will attract new audiences and enhance the reputation of the department and ASU,” she said.

The Gateway District also will house the Arts, Media and Engineering graduate program, a joint program of the Herberger College and ASU’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

The second phase of the ASU Art Museum will be designed as living and teaching space, where all museum functions – from storage, to curating, to installation – will be carried out in plain view, said Marilyn Zeitlin, director and chief curator. The expanded museum will include galleries of different character and scale, an education center and experiential studios.

The Arts and Business Gateway, because of its high-profile, high-traffic location on the southeastern corner of Mill Avenue and University Drive, also will raise the profile of the college within the community and among visitors to Tempe. New theatres and concert halls will draw the public into the space to attend performance events.

Wills said he marvels at what the college has been able to achieve despite tremendous physical limitations: “That we have been able to achieve top national rankings in all the disciplines despite our current facilities is a testament to the strength of our programs and our faculty over a long period of time. The possibilities of what we can do and what we can become, enhanced by the right environment, are exciting for us all.”

Wills says he expects the Arts and Business Gateway to contribute to instructional excellence and artistic quality; to the creation of community and collegiality; to interdisciplinary activity in teaching and research; and to more effective service for the university’s many publics. It also may help to solve the parking problem, which – after space – represents the biggest current challenge for college programs.

Concord Eastridge Inc., a national real estate development firm with headquarters in Phoenix and Washington, D.C., is partnering with ASU in the development of the project. The Concord Eastridge team includes world-class architects, planners, engineers and builders with decades of award-winning expertise. Key members of the team include financier Merrill Lynch, design architects Foster & Partners, Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner Inc., Will Bruder Architects Ltd., and production architect Kendall/Heaton Associates Inc. Turner Construction Company, one of the country’s premier general contractors, will build the project.

The feasibility assessment for the project is slated to be completed in December, followed by the recommendation to the Arizona Board of Regents in January. Plans then call for the architectural team – Foster & Partners, Behnisch Behnisch & Partner and Will Bruder Architects, together with Ten Eyck Landscape Architects – to work directly with the college in programming and architectural design for the Herberger portion of the Arts and Business Gateway District.