Arts centre

An art centre or arts center is distinct from an art gallery or art museum. An arts centre is a functional community centre with a specific remit to encourage arts practice and to provide facilities such as theatre space, gallery space, venues for musical performance, workshop areas, educational facilities, technical equipment, etc.

In the United States, "art centers" are generally either establishments geared toward exposing, generating, and making accessible art making to arts-interested individuals, or buildings that rent primarily to artists, galleries, or companies involved in art making.

In Britain, art centres began after World War II and gradually changed from mainly middle-class places to 1960s and 1970s trendy, alternative centres and eventually in the 1980s to serving the whole community with a programme of enabling access to wheelchair users and disabled individuals and groups.

In the rest of Europe it is common among most art centres that they are partly government funded, since they are considered to have a positive influence on society and economics according to the Rhineland model philosophy. A lot of those organisations originally started in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as squading spaces and were later on legalized.

Mesa Arts Center

The Mesa Arts Center is a performing and visual arts complex in downtown Mesa, Arizona. At more than 210,000 square feet (20,000 m²) square feet, the $95 million facility, completed in 2005, is the largest comprehensive arts campus in the state.

The Mesa Arts Center encompasses four performance venues, from the intimate 99-seat Farnsworth Studio Theater to the 1,600-seat Ikeda Theater. The center is also home to the Mesa Contemporary Arts, which houses five art galleries with 5,500 sq ft (510 m²) of exhibition space. The facility also features 14 unique visual and performing art classroom studios. Multi-use areas throughout the campus provide both indoor and outdoor gathering and presentation spaces.

Architecture

The architecture of the entire complex is primarily post-modern, with sharp, jagged angles, canted walls, sloping roofs, glass walls, and a reflection of the local vernacular in both colors and materials. The introverted campus is inspired by a geode, and guides pedestrians from the outer concrete walls to a central space of glass, water, and color. The complex was designed by Boora Architects of Portland, Oregon in associations with DWL Architects + Planners, Inc., of Phoenix, Arizona. Martha Schwartz Inc. served as landscape architect for the project.