Call it a “generational and stylistic dance between Frank Gehry and Maya Lin.” That’s how Gideon Lester, artistic director at Bard College’s Gehry-designed Fisher Center, referred to its forthcoming neighbor — a Lin-designed building that will provide studios for the center’s dance, theater, opera and orchestral performances.
The 25,000-square-foot building, which will cost $42 million and has not yet been named, is set to break ground next fall, the college said on Tuesday.
“We’re really bursting at the seams,” Lester said in an interview. “The Fisher Center is a hybrid building: It’s a professional performing arts center and it’s a producing house. But it’s also the home to several of Bard’s academic programs in the performing arts. We’re using all the spaces in the building, all the time.”
Beyond the need for more room, Bard is also hoping to double down on its growing cultural prominence far from its Hudson Valley campus — due in no small part to the Fisher Center’s role as an incubator of new shows. Among its successes is Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets,” lauded in 2018 by the New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”
Lin said her new building, a codesign with Bialosky and Partners, as well as the theater and acoustic engineering consultants Charcoalblue, was intended to provide both indoor and outdoor rehearsal spaces as the center adds more artists in residence.
A grass-topped roof will emerge from the ground in a sloping semicircle that creates a natural amphitheater on one side, allowing for public performances, while offering floor-to-ceiling studio windows on the other side. The swirling effect is meant to gently integrate the building into the surrounding meadow while creating a structure that complements — but never competes for attention with — Gehry’s adjoining signature handiwork.
“It was a dance,” Lin agreed of the balancing act, one she said she learned as a student of Gehry’s at Yale in the 1980s. “He’s the only person that said, ‘Don’t worry about deciding between art or architecture, just keep doing what you’re doing.’”
