DDF Associates
Purnell Center for the Arts
perspective rendering (1996)
The University Center Competition, too, incorporated a performing arts center, to be sited on the west side of the cut. A 1990 study by Damianos Brown Andrews and theater specialist John Sergio Fisher reviewed the project's program and location, but the site remained the same. The commission was finally awarded in a selection process won by Michael Dennis in association with Damianos and Fisher, over firms such as Venturi and Scott Brown, and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer.
The selection committee expressed a strong desire to complete the entire 1987 campus plan wherein the Purnell Center completes the quadrangle begun by the University Center and gives final definition to the cut. It provides balance to the heavy mass of the University Center across the way. The building has not been completed as planned, however, and the timing of a phase-two extension, which would extend the building northward toward and in front of Warner Hall and reprise the full length of the University Center colonnade, is uncertain.
Away from the cut, the site overlooks a steep ravine. Michael Dennis' designs emphasize the building's posture above and within the ravine, with a rotunda projected out into the void on a masonry podium. The rotunda also acts as the western terminus for the east-west pedestrian axis, in counterpoint to the dining-facility rotunda.
In the competition design, a virtually free-standing rotunda adjoined a gabled theater that featured a large lunette taken from Ledoux's Pavillon de Mademoiselle Guimard (1770). In the grander schematic design, the theater itself was turned slightly off axis and was itself given a billowing rotunda-like form, while a recital hall was added in the body of the building. In the current design, the axis has been restraightened, the theater has receded into the bulk of the building, the recital hall has yielded to a small studio theater, and the rotunda has diminished to a smallish vestibule and lobby.
The Purnell Center has been called the jewel of the campus building program; and a jewel may result. But jewels are expensive, and this one has lost some of its luster in the effort to make budget. The setting remains, however, and the building is pivotal in linking the East Campus to the west, the upper campus to the lower, the University Center colonnade to its alter ego.