After razing its aging theater building last fall, Macalester College this month began work on a $32 million replacement—the third and final phase of a long-range plan to upgrade all of its fine-arts facilities.
There’s now a hole where the 1960s-era theater building once stood on Macalester Street as part of the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center. By spring 2019, a sleek new structure designed by Minneapolis-based HGA will open in its place, completing an eight-year process that earlier saw extensive renovations to the college’s music and art buildings.
With a crane visible overhead and workers from McGough Construction placing its footings, the prospect of a new theater building is becoming more real for Macalester students and faculty, who are seeking not only improved arts facilities but also more and better classroom space—a need made more acute by steadily rising enrollment.
In addition to a state-of-the-art performance space and other theater-related uses, the new building will include nine new classrooms available on a school-wide basis. They will be open to any professor on campus but seem likely to be used most frequently by science students spilling over from the next-door Olin-Rice Science Center via a newly built skyway connection.
Read the complete article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Our enrollment has risen from 1,650 to 2,100 students in the last 20 years, and the demand for classrooms is high—especially during peak teaching times.
Karine Moe
Provost and Faculty Dean
