A 2-Year College's Performing-Arts Center Intends to Be a Landmark

Silver Spring, Md. — For a fairly small building, the new Performing Arts Center on Montgomery College's Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus here makes a big impression. Not only is it an architectural delight in a neighborhood of visual clutter, but it offers the college's theaterBridesmaid Dresses, dance, and film students beautiful new facilities—and makes the spaces available to the community as well.

The $31-million, 57,234-square-foot building overlooks a busy intersection on Georgia Avenue a few blocks outside of the District of Columbia. It’s beside a parcel of land that the two-year college acquired a few years back when the Giant Food supermarket chain sold its bakery, which the college deftly converted into a visual-arts building. College officials saved the adjoining corner site, once occupied by an animal hospital, for the new performing-arts center. And they asked architects from the firm SmithGroup to make it eye-catching.

That's why a box containing a big dance studio isGucci Basic Bi fold perched at an angle on the north end of the second floor, aiming a huge, Cyclopean window up East-West Highway. It's why the whole Georgia Avenue facade is glass, letting passers-by peer into the four classrooms, the gallery, and the lobby that serves the 500-seat main theater. And it's why a stairway at the south end of the building rises into a tall, zinc-sheathed tower. The tower lets the building hold its own against a taller building opposite, and also enlivens the entrance that many users rely on because it's closest to the campus garage.

All in all, it's the most interesting piece of architecture in Silver Spring since the Art Deco-style. Silver Theatre opened in 1938. And the college building is just as interesting inside. A two-story corridor topped with a skylight runs parallel to Georgia Avenue. On the first floor, an oval-shaped structure with translucent walls houses the ticket office and a concession stand. Across the corridor is the sloping wall of the main theater, the interior of which combines warm woodwork with metal-meshLouis Vuitton Speedy 30 screens and cloth baffles that can be lowered or raised to change the acoustics.

The building opened last year, and the main theater has already been used for lectures and dance and music performances. Upstairs is a smaller venue for theatrical productions, a 120-seat space that backs up to a workshop for building sets. When students aren't using them, both can be rented by community groups.

The second-floor dance studio, at left, and a stairtower serve as the design's bookends. (Photos by Alan Karchmer)

The dance studio's big window looks up East-West Highway.Louis Vuitton Neo Cab

The main theater seats 500.

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