825 Arts

A Perennial Community Asset Reoccupying a Historic Theater 825 Arts mission to be “welcoming to all” was a central goal for the project. A community-engaged design process transformed a long-abandoned historic Victoria Theater to support the cultural life of a diverse, dynamic neighborhood. This renewed building in the Frogtown and Rondo neighborhoods, now 825 Arts, supports and makes visible a vibrant arts community. The project provides a variety of flexible, multi-functional gathering spaces, it is environmentally and economically sustainable, and respects the building’s historic elements and the rich palimpsests of past occupations. The reshaped interiors include accessible, multi-functional spaces for music and dance, theater and film, gallery displays, teaching, and community gatherings. The formal design strategy was the preservation and recontextualization of fragmented layers of past uses while adding new programmatic elements to create a cohesive whole that maintains the remnants of past layers of history. These traces of past use were retained and exposed as much as possible: overlapping layers of paint, ghosted outlines of long-removed stairs, abandoned beam pockets and brick infilled openings of former windows.