The arts are all around us.

As humans, we're naturally drawn to art as a form of expression and communication.

The importance of art in society cannot be overstated.

Across the world, cities big and small, unite their residents through the arts to build strong and vibrant communities.

A thriving arts community is an essential part of a successful community.

This is what brings vibrancy to our community.

This is what creates experiences that attract the people that we want to attract to be a part of our community, and that attract businesses to want to be a part of our community.

During the 1950s, the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, recognized this importance, and, together with their newly founded local arts organization, sought to redevelop a struggling section of its downtown into a center for arts and culture.

Our community looked at arts and culture as an opportunity.

Our community leaders at that time looked at this area of downtown and said, we can build upon our new arts and cultural scene and create something special for this community.

Realizing the magnitude and significance of this project, community leaders hired world renowned architect Louis Kahn to design the center.

He was, by and large measure, arguably the most prominent American architect of the second half of the last century.

People revered his approach to architecture, his thoughts about materials and construction methods.

He talked about wanting to understand the essence of the structures that he was building.

The purpose of those.

How they impacted human behavior and the community that they are in.

Learn the story of Kahn's bold vision for this Midwestern city and the uniquely designed performing arts center he created that gave Fort Wayne, Indiana, A Home for the Arts The following program is made possible in part by Novae, headquartered in northeast Indiana, is the home of trailer brands like Sure-Trac, LOOK and Pace American.

Learn more at Novae Corp dot com Ferguson, a proud supporter of the arts and local documentaries on PBS Fort Wayne and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

During the 1950s, major changes to the city of Fort Wayne began to occur, which would have significant impacts on the downtown area.

In 1950, construction began on the U.S. 30 bypass to the north, along with the construction of the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum.

Small shopping centers began to appear outside of downtown, such as Quimby Village, Rudisill Center, South Anthony Plaza and Southgate Shopping Center.

In 1952, construction was completed on the Memorial Coliseum, and on September 28th, a dedication ceremony was held.

The Coliseum was intentionally built on the north side in the country to draw development north of the river.

Trains on the nickel plate, railroad tracks situated between Columbia and Superior streets often blocked northbound traffic, preventing growth on the north side of the city.

Mayor Harold W Baals proposed elevating the nickel plate tracks that ran along the location of the old Wabash and Erie Canal downtown.

Ground was broken on the elevation of the tracks in 1953 and construction was completed in 1956.

This opened a flood of suburban expansion to the north side of the city as the elevated tracks made automobile access much more convenient.

This northward expansion, however, would have a negative impact on business in downtown Fort Wayne.

Downtown at that time looked very much like the landing.

The canal was no longer there, but the buildings that originally serviced the canal and many industrial type of warehouses filled a good majority of downtown.

In between Clinton Street and Lafayette Street, in between Main Street and the Railroad Viaduct.

Initially had about 140 different buildings.

There were vegetable warehouses and there were bars.

And there were there were just a variety of buildings that were mostly in disrepair and that really needed to be cleaned up.

And so you needed to see a redevelopment, a renaissance in downtown Fort Wayne.

Suburbanization was happening so the interstate went in and business and enterprise that was downtown originally moved out to the suburbs along with housing.

And so downtown was looking for what it would become next.

As sections of downtown were declining.

Fort Wayne Community leaders turned their attention toward the arts and cultural organizations that existed in the city at that time.

The idea was to bring these organizations together and turn a struggling area of downtown into a campus for the arts.

When Arts United was originally founded, it was called the Fine Arts Foundation.

The Fine Arts Foundation was created in 1955, and it was created really with the purpose of creating a campus for the arts.

When the Fine Arts Foundation was formed, there were actually only six organizations.

It was a very different time.

It was a very different structure.

At the time we had a Fort Wayne Philharmonic, we had a Civic Theater, we had a Fort Wayne Ballet, we had a Fort Wayne Art School, and we had a community concerts organization.

And then we had a history center.

And so those were kind of the core organizations, when Arts United was founded as the Fine Arts Foundation, that this community was building, its legacy of an arts and cultural community on those organizations.

One of the primary drivers to build an arts campus in downtown was the need for space.

The Civic Theater and other performing organizations were finding it hard to identify venues that were appropriate and not dilapidated to perform in.

So at the time, the discussion was around should it be located in downtown or should it be located somewhere else in the community?

In 1959, the city's Redevelopment Commission was founded and the first redevelopment project for the City of Fort Wayne was this downtown arts campus.

And so at that time, the city looked at this entire swath of land from Clinton Street to Lafayette Street, from Main Street to the Railroad Viaduct.

And at the time there were about 140 different business structures in those square blocks, and they were buildings that were becoming a blighted area.

And the community said, we can do something new and different in that space.

Our organization and the Redevelopment Commission created a plan, so they decided to select a prominent architect to do something that they saw would be like Lincoln Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

As a matter of fact, they had been watching what John D. Rockefeller III was doing in New York City.

This community had such a bold vision that they wanted to create a campus for the arts in downtown Fort Wayne that would rival Lincoln Center in New York City.

The Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation Building Committee went through a large selection process for the Architect for the Future Arts campus.

They wanted to make sure that we hired someone who was prominent who would do something that was new and bold for Fort Wayne.

Our community looked at I.M.

Pei and Eero Saarinen and Mies Van Der Rohe.

But they also looked at Louis Kahn, and Louis Kahn ended up being probably the preeminent architect of the second half of the 20th century.

Following the death of Frank Lloyd Wright, who was such a powerful influence early in the century on the latter half of the century, Louis Kahn really became the preeminent architect and was so influential over many other architects.

Our group of community leaders who were exploring who was the right architect for this community.

After interviewing all of these organizations, made the decision that Louis Kahn was the right person for our community.

Kahn was born in Estonia and moved to the United States about when he was three.

His family settled in the Philadelphia area.

He was always fascinated with light and burned himself when he was very young.

He had collected a hot coal from his family's fire and it caught his apron on fire and he badly scarred one side of his face.

But he would use those coals when they cooled to be able to draw.

He was an artist.

His parents were both artists and musicians as well.

He was based in Philadelphia.

He wanted to be an artist up until his senior year in high school, when he took an architecture class and fell in love with architecture.

He went to the University of Pennsylvania, studied architecture, and then taught for ten years at Yale and the remainder of his career at Penn.

His interest in the visual arts influenced his work throughout his life.

As an architect, Kahn loved the use of natural materials, but he loved the use of these sort of monumental structures and created buildings that had substance, which was very different from architects like Mies Van Der Rohe.

When you look at the glass and steel skyscrapers that were going up in Chicago and New York, you know, at the same period that Kahn was doing his work, very, very different in style.

I find the best way to describe Kahn's buildings are mid-century a bit brutalist in terms of their structure.

Generally constructed out of masonry, concrete and brick.

Kahn was an architect who did not do a tremendous amount of work, but the work that he did do was significant.

So Kahn does not have hundreds of buildings throughout the world, but the buildings that he has are masterpieces.

I.M.

Pei, speaking about Louis Kahn, described him as saying that most architects are lucky if you have one masterpiece, well Kahn has five masterpieces that he constructed within ten years.

They include the Phillips Exeter Library in New Hampshire, the Yale Center for British Art, the Kimball Art Museum, the National Assembly Buildings in Dhaka, the Salk Institute for Biologic Studies, and the Indian Institute of Management.

The Fine Arts Foundation, engaged Louis Kahn in 1960 to begin working with our community.

In 1961, Kahn developed his first conceptual plan for what this arts campus would look like.

And so our community began the fundraising that was needed to develop that.

These plans were huge, and it was an incredibly bold vision.

Kahn was very engaged with the concept of having a campus for the arts, a home for the arts.

He was quoted as saying that when he came here, he found that the arts organizations together made something greater as a whole than their individual parts and as the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation had charged him with creating a district for the arts in Fort Wayne.

He felt that the relationship of the buildings to each other was an important part of telling that particular story, and that as people approached the buildings and interacted with them, they would enter through what he called a court of entrances and experience all of the buildings together as they related to each other.

In the same way that the arts organizations all related to each other.

It was definitely a very bold and outsized plan that included multiple buildings and what Kahn envisioned was a performing arts theater and a smaller experimental theater, a large symphony orchestra hall, an art museum, a history museum a fine arts school and administrative building for these arts organizations and outdoor spaces, including an amphitheater and garden spaces.

And with the concept that these organizations, by being grouped together, would create a synergy, would create something special, something more than just being independent organizations scattered around the community.

In 1964, three sketches by Louis Kahn of the proposed buildings were hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The sketches were displayed along with samples of the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe.

The three men were considered the dominant figures in the architectural revolution of the 20th century and were honored at the opening of a new wing at the museum.

Introductory Remarks posted by the Museum of Modern Art stated that the plans for the Fort Wayne Center are included because of Kahn's fresh approach and unique treatment during the 1960s before construction began.

Kahn came up with a variety of iterations of what this campus might look like.

He looked at different geometric shapes for the buildings.

He looked at different positions for the buildings.

As we moved through the sixties and the community was engaged in the fundraising.

The community recognized we're not going to be able to execute the entire vision that Kahn had intended when Kahn originally provided the district plan to the Fine Arts Foundation.

They said, What will this cost?

And he said, Well, something in the neighborhood of $20 million.

And they said, Well, we had something more like 2 million in mind.

What can you build us for $2 million?

And he was a little upset by that because he had put so much effort into making sure that the buildings related to each other because he had found that extra quality that the arts organizations related to each other here.

He didn't feel that he could just build them one of the buildings that he would need to redesign all over again.

And he wanted to design for the problem that was presented.

What the Fine Arts Foundation did was they looked at what were the critical needs for our community and how could those critical needs be best addressed given the resources that we had at the time?

And following the completion of two fundraising campaigns, the community was able to raise $4 million, which enabled them to construct the Performing Arts Center.

A theater, which I am building in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

I came to the conclusion that one must distinguish the auditorium and the stage as a violin a sensitive instrument, where one is to hear.

That a whisper could be heard without any amplification, and that the lobbies and all other adjunct spaces are merely that which composes the violin case.

That distinction, the violin and the violin case, that look completely different from each other.

Louis Kahn had a concept for what a performing arts space should be and could be.

He wanted the experience for the audience to be something that was magical.

He wanted that experience to be something that really allowed them to get into this space.

So he created this building where the theater itself is actually a building inside the outer shell of the building.

He wanted to shelter the interior space from whatever was going on externally at the building.

In Fort Wayne, that means that the elevated rail behind the building, which creates a lot of noise and vibration, would have been disruptive to the auditorium and the stage.

So here he insulated the auditorium and the stage through what he called a violin inside a violin case.

A lot of people would call it just a box inside a box, but essentially the auditorium chamber and its catwalks all the way up to the proscenium opening are encased in concrete, completely separate from the exterior building that wraps around it.

So the outer shell of the building is the violin case.

The theater itself is the violin.

It's the instrument through which these arts experiences happen.

So this theater began construction in 1970, and it was completed in 1973.

And the length of time that it took to construct this building is very apparent in the materials and the workmanship that went into this building During the construction of the building.

Kahn had a very particular type of brick that he wanted to be utilized for this building.

It came from his home state of Pennsylvania.

There were questions by the construction firm that the Fine Arts Foundation was working with that, hey, maybe a different type of brick would be more appropriate to this climate.

But Kahn was an architect, he was an artist, and he had a very particular vision.

And this was exactly the brick that he wanted.

When you are dealing or designing in brick, you must ask the brick what it wants or what it can do.

And if you ask Brick what it wants, it'll say, Well, I like an arch.

And then you say, but arches are difficult to make they cost more money.

I think you can use concrete across your opening equally as well, but the brick says, Oh, I know, I know, you're right.

But, you know, if you ask me what I like, I like an arch.

that's knowing the order.

It's knowing its nature, its knowing what it can do and respect that tremendously.

If you're dealing with brick, don't just use it as another kind of say secondary availability or that it's cheaper.

No, you've got to put it into absolute glory.

And that is the only position that it deserves.

Deserves that point.

Dealing with concrete.

You must know the order of concrete.

You must know its nature what concrete really strives to be.

He was very thoughtful in his choices of masonry.

Concrete in our building, for example, has a warm brown tone to it.

It is a very intentional aggregate mixture that he formulated.

It includes things like volcanic ash and other things that allows the concrete to look, as it does.

It also is a space that architects marvel at when they come in and tour this building.

When you show people this building inside a building and you look up and you see these concrete beams that support the ceiling, which are over 100 feet in a single pour span, there are 27 of them holding up the roof.

Those run from wall to wall on the exterior, but they never touch the interior of the theater itself.

So the interior theater is completely separated from this external building.

The details in this building are pretty exquisite and unusual.

If you spend any amount of time in the building, you will notice that natural light passes through the lobby spaces during the day as a south facing building.

So the building has its own life, or, as Kahn would say, its own soul.

One of the things that Kahn absolutely loved was how light played inside of a building and where we're sitting today.

You experience the light as it comes in through the windows works, its way through the arches that were such an important component of design for Kahn And you can see the way the light plays inside the building and creates shapes.

Kahn had intersecting arches, and as the various windows allow light to come in through different angles, it plays through these arches and creates patterns throughout the lobby that are just really fascinating to see how that light dances inside the building, how it plays with that.

And Kahn knew exactly what he was doing.

The design of the auditorium for this venue, or what we call the house, is rather unique.

The folded concrete walls that are on both sides of the auditorium intentionally break up sound reflection in the space.

The seating in the space is continental style Seating, it is democratic intentionally.

We do not have a center aisle.

Kahn wanted there to be an intimate experience between audience member and performer here.

When the actors perform their most pivotal scenes in a theater, they tend to perform those to the center of the audience.

So if you have a center aisle, the actor is actually performing to an empty space.

Kahn wanted to make sure that that experience of actor to audience members was, in fact, more personal than that And so he wanted to eliminate that center aisle and create the continental seating that we have.

He wanted the audience to have that intimate experience in which they would be able to hear spoken word from stage without amplification.

And so the size of the room, the folded concrete of the walls, the layout of the seating all helps accomplish that.

The sightlines here are very good, and that is intentional.

There's a little bit of forced perspective in the room in that if you sit in the auditorium seats at the rear of the theater, it feels like the stage is quite a bit away from you.

But if you are standing on stage, the perspective of the audience makes it feel like the audience members are right there with the performers.

And that is, I believe, very intentional on his part.

Grand opening week was held at the end of September 1973, ran through the early beginning of October.

It was a full week long celebration of all things art and culture.

Performances by schools, arts and culture, organizations, lectures, many other things.

Civic theater was involved and the Philharmonic was involved, and Fort Wayne Ballet was involved.

So that they did bring in a variety of performing arts organizations to showcase what the building was going to be doing for the community.

This grand opening was attended by Louis Kahn and his wife.

He provided a lecture and a tour and attended several of the benefit dinners that went along with this grand opening week.

Unfortunately, this would be the last grand opening of one of his buildings Kahn would attend on March 17th, 1974, just six months after the opening of the Performing Arts Center.

Louis Kahn died suddenly of a heart attack at Pennsylvania Station in New York City.

He was 73 years old When the Performing Arts Center opened in 1973.

It immediately became a hub for arts and cultural experiences in this community.

This is where the Civic Theater performed, where the Fort Wayne Ballet performed, where the Fort Wayne Philharmonic performed.

The Fort Wayne Civic Theater produces multiple large scale family musicals every single year.

We see professional ballet by the Fort Wayne Ballet.

They do that in conjunction with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic.

We are very unique and lucky that those two professional organizations produce ballet performances together here.

You can see children's theater here.

You can attend classes and camps to learn acting here.

We have a full scene shop here full constructing working scene shop that is used year round by one of our resident production companies, the Civic Theater.

They operate as a producing house from this particular venue.

In addition to that, beyond the stage level is Actors House and Actors House has two very large accommodating dressing rooms that have private dressing rooms, as well as chorus, dressing rooms, showers and all of the restroom facilities necessary.

Beyond that, there is a large green room where actors meet and relax before the performance.

The Civic Theater also has a full working costume shop in this building at the lower level.

And then on the upper level, we have two very large rooms that are about the same footprint as playing space proper on stage, where groups hold classes, camps and rehearsals year round.

Every day, all day, art is being created, where those costumes are being sewn and those sets are being built.

Workshops, classes for Youth Theater, rehearsals, for Civic Theater performances.

These are ongoing activities that are happening every day inside this building.

And so while the Fort Wayne Ballet may be performing on stage, Civic Theater during the day is constructing the sets for their next show in the same shop.

And during the evening, while a performance might be happening on stage, there can be a rehearsal upstairs in the rehearsal hall for a production that may be happening three weeks down the road.

The companies who work inside this building, their local companies and whether they're professional companies like the Fort Wayne Philharmonic or the Fort Wayne Ballet, who has professional dancers, professional musicians, or whether they're community volunteers like the Civic Theater or like Fort Wayne Dance Collective or the Youth Theater.

And so these are truly community performances built by our community and put on for our community.

The Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation voted to change their name in the mid 1980s to Arts United to reflect the broader community that they served at the time they had expanded the number of member groups over time from their original founding to then and felt that that change in name would better reflect what the purpose of this organization was.

We weren't really a foundation.

We were really an organization who was here to unite arts and culture for our community.

And so at the time that the organization made the change in name also made the decision to identify this building more with Arts United, the organization, and so changed the name from that Performing Arts Center to the Arts United Center to reflect that this building is an important part of the work of the organization.

But also this building reflects a united arts community.

The concept of the arts campus did not leave Fort Wayne even when Kahn left and although we only were able to realize one of his structures, the idea that we could have a collection of arts and culture organizations in a neighborhood together was something that we wanted to continue.

And this community has in fact, followed through on that vision that Kahn projected.

So the Arts United Center opened in 1973.

In 1984, the Museum of Art opened next door.

In 1990, the Hall Community Arts Center opened, which houses Cinema Center and Fort Wayne Dance Collective Arts United purchased the Nipsco Building across the street from the Arts United Center in 2010, moved the Fort Wayne Ballet in, moved Art Link in, into a building that became the Auer Center for Arts and Culture.

In 2014, we added Arts Lab, which is that small experimental theater that Khan had originally envisioned for this arts campus.

So over these past 50 years, this community has built on that vision that Khan had originally created and has in fact created a campus for the arts in downtown Fort Wayne.

The Arts United Center, the theater as we know it today is the flagship building here in the Arts district.

Many other architects, when they came to construct other buildings in this district, did so in reference to this particular building, either using similar color brick or referencing the arches on the windows, things like that.

Because architects revered Khan in such a way, it is a gem in terms of mid-century architecture and knowing that it is the only one like it in the entire world leaves us with something to be very proud of.

We were told that there's no community in the state of Indiana that has this density of collection of arts and cultural organizations that we have in Fort Wayne.

This is something that's truly unique.

This is a differentiator for our community.

And I think this is something that our community is proud of.

You can drive down Main Street and you see arts and culture.

You see the value that our community places on arts and culture, and you can see the impact it has brought to our community.

Humans love to connect with each other.

Arts and cultural experiences are designed to connect people.

This is what these experiences are about and whether it's a theatrical performance where you have actors on stage performing to an audience and that audience is connecting with the story that those actors are telling, or whether it's walking through a museum and connecting with the expression that an artist may have conveyed 100 years ago.

Those kinds of experiences touch people's lives.

You are literally bringing together hundreds and hundreds of people.

This is what arts and cultural experiences are about.

It's about bringing people together and our community needs that today more than we ever have in the past.

The Arts United Center has been an integral part of Fort Wayne's thriving arts scene.

The community leaders of the past, along with Louis Kahn, laid the foundation, which created the artistic and cultural vibrancy this city has today.

The Arts United Center has been serving the city of Fort Wayne for 50 years, and it is poised to continue to serve this community for generations to come.

The preceding program is made possible in part by Novae, headquartered in northeast Indiana, is the home of trailer brands like Sure-Trac, LOOK and Pace American.

Learn more at Novae Corp dot com Ferguson, a proud supporter of the arts and local documentaries on PBS Fort Wayne and by viewers like you.

Thank you.