- December 3, 2024
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With the design of 38 performing arts venues listed on its website, the Boston architecture firm of William Rawn Associates is no stranger to the type of facility envisioned by the Sarasota Orchestra at its nearly 32-acre Fruitville Road site.
Rawn is also quite familiar with the orchestra’s ambitious plan to build an 1,800-seat concert hall, a 700-seat recital hall and multiple education spaces.
Last week, the orchestra announced that Rawn was named the design architect of the project located less than a mile west of I-75 on the site it acquired for $14 million. There, Rawn will team with executive architect HKS, a global firm with offices in Orlando, and acoustician and theatre planner Stages Consultants of Highland Park, New Jersey to design the Sarasota Orchestra Music Center.
Rawn is well familiar with the goal to build the Music Center, having discussed plans with the organization for more than a decade as its possible locations meandered around the area, including Payne Park Auditorium and the Sarasota County Fairgrounds, among others.
The location was solidified with the orchestra’s acquisition of the property from Walmart Stores East LP in May 2023.
“This has been talked about and in the works for a very long time,” said Rawn principal Doug Johnston. “Our knowledge of the project and our first chance to come down and start talking to people was well over a decade ago, and it's been through several planning iterations since then. We've been following this for quite some time and started to really understand it as a project that involves a lot of components that our firm is particularly interested In.”
The firm has hit the ground running on a concept design that Sarasota Orchestra President and CEO Joseph McKenna said he hopes to have available to present to the public, and in particular potential donors, in spring 2025. The concept is a critical step for a capital campaign as it provides a design to augment the vision. It’s also the foundation on which to build a budget for the project.
“The conceptual won't be the final design, but It will give people a sense of what's going to land on that site,” McKenna said. “Certainly a visual representation and an image of what the vision is really does help elevate people's sense of the project. We already are in the leadership phase of talking with donors. While we don't have the concept to share with them, there are leadership donors who are fully aware of what we're trying to do.”
Sarasota Orchestra’s goal is to create a destination to better serve the Sarasota-Manatee region. The location just off I-75 is geographically in the center of the target market, somewhat equidistant from downtown, Venice, Bradenton and the rapidly growing upscale neighborhoods east of I-75.
High-end restaurants just north of the site at University Town Center and in the growing Fruitville Commons area east of the interstate already provide pre-concert dining options with more to come.
The Rawn team thinks of the site as the opening of a gateway to downtown.
“We think the site being just west of I-75 allows us to create a gateway heading toward downtown Sarasota,” said Rawn Principal Cliff Gayley. “It feels like a real opportunity to create a center of gravity that connects from that site all the way to downtown, and encourages the rest of the community to fill in the space between the two.”
At nearly 32 acres, the site is large, but so are the opportunities it presents. The Rawn leadership collectively said while the building will be the centerpiece, the provides options to create interactive outdoor spaces that will complement and enhance the patron experience.
“We’re going to need to have enough space for all the parking and to be able to manage the water flood mitigation,” said Gayley. "I think the real opportunity that we see is to create a sense of place in the placement of the building and how we choreograph the arrival onto the site with the views to the building as you come in, and the views from the building out to the landscape.
“Rather than thinking of it as a building on a site, we're building a campus with great outdoor spaces and indoor spaces that really speak to one another.”
Outdoor music spaces are an option to consider, but on an intimate scale.
“We’re absolutely thinking about activity happening outside, and I think we'd be hard pressed to say that we wouldn't want to have places for music to spill out into the landscape,” Gayley said. “Exactly what kind of a format that would be and where it might take place, these will be things that are part of part of the design conversation.”
Music to the ears of residents who border the north side of the property, though, is that any outdoor music spaces would be intimate in nature.
“I don’t want to leave the wrong impression,” Johnston said. “This is not going to be a site for a big country music Festival that has eight stages.”
Moving the Music Center away from the gulf shoreline, McKenna said, “takes flooding from storm surge off the table,” citing the Hurricane Milton-induced flooding of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall — one of the orchestra’s performance venues — as the prime example.
“You can have the effects of storm anywhere, but when you're not sitting right on the coastline you remove that storm surge as at least one vulnerability,” McKenna said.
Resiliency, the Rawn representatives said, is top of mind in light of the three named storms that impacted Sarasota this hurricane season.
“We’re very, mindful to be planning for (resilience) in the design of the building, both the materials of the building itself,” said Associate Principal Kevin Bergeron, Rawn’s project manager for the facility. “It's good that we’re well away from the bay, but we do have inland flooding to consider. We'll be working to establish a safe ground floor elevation stormwater mitigation strategy around the site.”
Rawn is responsible for the concept and vision of the project, at which time HKS, along with the acoustician, and an eventually named landscape architect to design the outdoor aesthetic in concert with stormwater management practices. That stage, though, won’t be a handoff. Rawn will stay with the project through completion.
“We work very hand-in-hand with our acoustician, Stages, and we’re going to be right there with every decision about how to shape the hall, but the place to start is that this is not a theater. This is a room for music, and we will design it from the stage going out,” Gayley said. “While we want it to be really a beautiful space for live, unamplified music, we recognize the power of a symphony orchestra, which can produce a lot of sound. And then there's a range of other music types that that may well be performing in this space, so we have what we call variable acoustics.”
Those include elements deployed either along the wall or in the ceiling that reduce reverberation and accommodate a range of music performed sans amplification. The starting point though, is to create an optimum space for orchestral music.
Among several others, Rawn’s performance hall projects include:
Rawn’s Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, was named “Second Best American Concert Hall built in the last 50 Years” and “13th Best Concert Hall in the World” by Leo Beranek’s Concert Halls and Opera Houses.
McKenna said as the area continues to grow, the location of the project is at the geographic middle of population centers and is more convenient for the orchestra’s education program participants. It also provides more convenient access for other music organizations scattered throughout region.
“We are arriving with this project at the 75th anniversary of the orchestra,” Gayley said, “and we'd like to think that what we do here will affect the next 75 years.”
