Snow College Eccles Performing Arts Center

Snow College has the reputation as the smallest college with the strongest academic reputation in Utah. Former President Higbee charged the faculty ‘… to make the college the center and heart of the intellectual, cultural and aesthetic life of this area.” Thus started the journey towards the realization of the new performing arts center and music school. The challenge was to scale down the volume required for the reverberation of each of the performance halls. Classrooms, practice rooms and rehearsal spaces surround the performance. Light and shadow further animate the facade, framing fragments of instruments and students visible from outside and framing the mountains and landscape visible from the inside. Benches and window boxes inhabited by students create a living wall’ that further mediates scale. The ceiling plane of the lobby, takes the form of a knot linking the music department with the theatre department. The material is transparent when lit from above and opaque when lit from below. The form is dramatic and sets the stage for the lobby on performance night. Modes of operation were programmed and designed into the facility and the building transforms based on the use. Spaces operate in – classroom mode – collaboration mode – display mode. The lobby has tiers for choral performance during an intermission – it is acoustically designed to be used as rehearsal space during collaboration mode. At night the facade is animated by students working in the practice studios.