Today I listened to the Kansas City Symphony rehearse at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, and it’s just not going to be the same orchestra again. Playing in this kind of performance hall is going to change them. They now have the setting that will help them really step up, and that’s true of the opera, of the ballet and of all the theatrical productions that will be performed here.
When a city gets a great museum, a new facility for the performing arts or, for that matter, when a sport lover gets a new stadium or arena, it opens a whole realm that wasn’t there before. A great cultural institution raises people’s sense of place, identity and community. It opens up a whole range of new experiences. My role has been to make the architecture part of that experience.
I liken the process of developing the Kauffman Center to producing grand opera: You have set designers, lighting designers, singers, the orchestra, the chorus master, the conductor and, obviously, the composer. You need everybody to have a great production, and any one person can mess it up. It’s very similar with architecture. We have theater consultants, acousticians, engineers, landscape architects, designers and the contractor, and it’s a really complicated orchestration. So when it comes together with success, as I believe the Kauffman Center has, it means the team has somehow really managed to work together in an effective way.
When designing a performing arts center, the first order of the day is that you have to design the perfect instrument. This structure is going to have amazing acoustics. It’s going to have great sightlines, and it’s going to be a well-oiled machine for the theater, the opera and the ballet. All of this was basically a tall technical order, but you want something that’s going to be inspiring to people, so they’ll get a sense of the ceremony of attending a performance.
We’re at a place in time where the public can see or hear anything they want in the comforts of their own home. If they go to do it in public, it’s a ritual. The building is also about that ritual.
When I first came to Julia Irene Kauffman to discuss this project, my first impression was of the amazing site she had picked. The Center crowns the promontory, so it’s seen from everywhere as you come toward downtown from the south. Everyone was thinking the Center would face downtown, that you’d arrive from downtown and that that was where the lobbies would be. I just thought the horizon line and the view were so amazing that I reversed it.
I made one lobby rather than, say, two halls with two separate entrances and lobbies, because I wanted everybody to mix and get to see each other. You can have a highbrow group of people in the concert hall and a more youthful event in the Proscenium Theater, and I think that’s going to encourage an interesting social mix of people in the building.
The design is uncannily similar to the model we first created 10 years ago. We have realized everything we’d dreamt about from the beginning, and it is very pleasing that there have been very few compromises.
At its best I hope the building I have created becomes a symbol for its city; that it grows and becomes part of the community identity. How far that goes, I can’t predict. I always come back to them.
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