BG Reports

By Christina Hepner

The Wolfe Center for the Arts is a building with a sleek design and distinctive structure that is new to Bowling Green State University’s campus and has opened its door for the spring semester.

The unique structure of the Wolfe Center for the Arts building. Photo by Christina Hepner.

The center is named after Mary and Frederic Wolfe, well-known art philanthropists from Perrysburg, Ohio.  The Wolfe’s donated $1.5 million making them the lead donators.

SNØHETTA, an international architectural firm from Norway, designed the Wolfe Center.  The center is their first completed project in North America.

Planning for the Wolfe Center started in 2006 but they did not start construction until 2010.  “Give us a building and put it on top of the earth,” said Ron Shields, the chair of the Theatre and Film department.  He went on to describe how the center is meant to look like the formation of the land in northwest Ohio.

The mosaic tiles displayed in the Eva Marie Saint Theatre lobby. Photo by Christina Hepner.

The Eva Marie Saint Theatre has the design of a black box theatre.  A black box theater is where actors perform in the center of the stage where there are platforms that can be risen.  The lobby of this theater has a unique design with mosaic tiles on display in the flooring.  These mosaics are over 2,000 years old and the university is happy to have a proper place to display them, Ryan Miller, the project manager of the Wolfe Center said.

The Donnell Theatre is the main theater in the Wolfe Center.  It is the most expensive room in the center.  They have brand new equipment and a state of the art performance stage, Shields said.  There is not a lot of seating but the stage is set up just like it would be on Broadway, giving students real world experience.

“The first time I walked into the Wolfe Center, I was blown away,” said Corey James, a telecommunications major who takes classes in the center.  He loved the architecture and was excited to be able to be part of the first group of students to have classes there.

The Wolfe Center marks the importance of the arts at BGSU.

Tags: Eva Marie Saint Theatre, SNØHETTA, Wolfe Center

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 10:36 pm and is filed under BGSU, Spring 2012, Student Contributor, Wolfe Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.