The Boston Arts Academy is Boston’s only public school for the visual and performing arts. Located in the city’s historic Fenway neighborhood (across the street from Fenway Park), the school’s previous facility was a century-old post office garage that had been renovated and reconfigured multiple times to try to suit its academic function.

This project called for demolition of the former facility to allow for the construction of a 153,500 square foot new structure. The new facility allowed for appropriate floor-to-floor heights to suit the school’s various uses including the 500-seat Mayor Martin J. Walsh Theater, a 200-seat black box theater, 4 dance studios, 2D and 3D art studios, and the 5th floor recital hall with roof terrace, in addition to 17       general academic classrooms and 5 science labs.

For this project, Perkins Eastman collaborated with Wilson Butler Architects, who specialize in performing arts spaces. Both architectural teams worked in the same Revit model hosted on our servers. As part of the design process and for presentations, we used virtual reality technology extensively. We found this to be a very effective way to communicate with the client and users.

Deliverables: Schematic Design Documents, Design Development Documents, Construction Documents, Specifications

Software: Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Navisworks, Dynamo, Enscape