Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center

3775 Central Avenue, Memphis, TN 38111 United States

Building Area (sf): 82,263

Completion: September 2022

Architect of Record:

archimania

• Owner/Client:
• General Contractor: Montgomery Martin Contractors
• Electrical: Fleming Architects - Consulting Architect
  Civil, Structural - Burr & Cole Consulting Engineers
  Haltom Engineering - MP/FP
  Canup Engineering - Electrical
  Acoustic Distinctions, Inc. - Acoustical and AV
  Ritchie Smith Associates - Landscape Architect
• Engineering:
  
• Other:
  
• Photography:
  firm
  

The Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center expands the School of Music’s instructional areas and provides a multi-function performance hall for the School and community partners.

The Rudi Scheidt School of Music is a regional leader in music education and had outgrown is current facilities. The Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center’s design emerged from intense acoustic requirements and the School’s plan for growth, along with an idea to ‘grow’ the campus fabric northward. The new Center creates spaces for learning and engagement and triples the audience the school can entertain at one time, while providing a venue that functions both as a concert hall and opera house. In addition to providing unique social and exchange spaces for students, faculty, and community, the Center contains practice rooms, teaching studios, recording studios, and Orchestral, Jazz, and Choral rehearsal rooms.

The design creates and aligns the front porch of the building to a campus ‘spine’ that continues across Central Avenue to a primary artery of the campus to the south. A public hallway with indoor and outdoor spaces along the West and South sides of the building allows the School’s activity to be more visible to the community. Exterior massing materials communicate the goals of the building: lower brick volumes tie the building to campus with red ‘university brick,’ an elevated volume that is silvery and reflective defines the perimeter of the building, and taller inner volumes driven by performance spaces wrapped in white ‘curtain’ panels that blend into the clouds.