The new Kennedy Center for Theatre and the Studio Arts is situated directly across from the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art. Together with a McKim Mead and White-designed building for the art history department, and a new lawn and pond designed by Reed Hilderbrand, the new Center is part of a highly visible arts quad. A key part of the new facility is a unique kind of studio art space — large common areas for classes and exhibitions, smaller workshops and studios surrounding those areas, and a new interdisciplinary, digitally-based Studio for Trans-media Arts and Related Studies (STARS). The new building includes a fully equipped, flexible theatre (175 seats), with support spaces and dressing rooms, accommodating various types of productions from any culture or period. The main performance theatre has enabled the department to expand its productions and provide students with vastly improved performance and teaching venues.

Our work on the Kennedy Center for Theatre and Studio Art included the addition of a dedicated central heating and cooling plant for the new building, and an “aggressive” energy recovery policy, allowing the consumption of fossil fuels only as the last source of energy for heating. Systems included energy recovery features such as: non-reversible heat pumps for heating and cooling, reliance on geothermal energy stored from the cooling season to provide for heating in winter, passive energy recovery coils to be utilized on all exhaust air streams where possible, and air-to-air heat exchangers to be used for high efficiency heat recovery from benign exhaust and relief air streams.