At RPI

edited by Sheila Kim -- Interior Design, 12/1/2003 12:00:00 AM

After two years of talk, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, has unveiled plans for its Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, slated to open in 2006. Designed by Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners with Davis Brody Bond as architect of record, the 203,000-square-foot EMPAC will boast a 3,500-square-foot studio, a 1,200-seat concert hall, music rehearsal spaces, and student facilities, all built into a hill overlooking the city.

The new center will address the school's need for a state-of-the-art performance space that could house not only student productions but also work by outside artists and performers. Additionally, the building will boast updated, soundproofed studio classrooms for RPI's electronic-arts bachelor students and a new cutting-edge facility for the school's radio station. "It's in the vein of a laboratory," adds senior architect William Horgan. "It's experimental in nature, appropriate to what will be born in the programs there."