One year after the grand reopening of the expanded Fine Arts Center, Colorado College is blowing the trumpets across the street to announce the official opening of its ambitious new arts center.

Sure, the Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center has been open all summer for a music festival, films, art shows and other events.

But college officials wanted to wait until the students were back to kick it up for the official grand opening festivities, which begin today with the death-defying yet graceful aerial dances of California-based Project Bandaloop (click here for details). Here’s your guide to the new arts center and all the opening stuff.

What it isIt’s a $33.4 million gray building designed to be an interdisciplinary classroom as well as one of the region’s prime arts destinations.Tom Lindblade, the chairman of CC’s department of drama and dance, recently gave a guided tour of the building, which is packed with more beautiful performance spaces, multipurpose classrooms, technology-stuffed labs, and other bells and whistles than any other place in town.Plus, it still has that seductive new-car smell and feel.”I’ve been here at CC almost 20 years,” says Lindblade, who is part of a group of faculty members who have been dreaming and scheming about a new facility for 14 of those years. “Now, with this center, we are in a different era. This school is in a different league. And everybody – including Joe Sixpack – should be able to find something here that will blow their mind.”

New sonic frontierFor more than a decade, it’s been possible to tune a small practice room to sound like anything from a rock arena to Carnegie Hall.Thanks to D.L. Adams Associates, a Denver acoustic engineering firm that has designed performance spaces around the globe, Cornerstone takes that concept one step further. Its auditorium can be electronically tuned and manipulated for any kind of sound.”Music and drama are two ends of the acoustic spectrum,” says Stephanie Adams-Ball, who was the project director for the auditorium’s cuttingedge sound system. “These are two very different acoustic environments, and they demand two very different sound systems. So we tried to build a space that could accommodate both.”Looking around the room, you can see dozens of small black boxes on the wood-accented walls. These boxes are the secret of the auditorium’s electro-acoustic sound system. In addition to amplifying sound, as traditional sound systems do, this one combines 54 speakers with 24 microphones that, curiously, make the sound come off as more natural.

Inside the designThis is a building with a point, and we’re not just talking about the copper thing that juts north from the roof.In many cases, institutions hire an architect to design a new structure and the people who visit or work in the structure must adapt.In the case of the Cornerstone Arts Center, the design was based around the needs of the people who would be spending time in the building, beginning with students.The building was designed by Antoine Predock, an award-winning architect with offices in Albuquerque and Taiwan. Predock worked to create a design that would embody the school’s multifaceted approach to education.The result is a structure where every space has been designed to have at least three possible functions.”Colorado College philosophically engages all the disciplines in a special way,” Predock says, “and the building is evidence of that.”The building’s exterior is visually stunning. Inside, various designs, styles and materials compete with one another for dominance. But there is no clear winner. Rather, the diverse shapes and looks wrestle one another to a draw.”It’s a demolition derby of ideas,” Predock admits. “But the building was designed to facilitate creativity. The design is not neutral. The space itself will shape activity.”Or as dance and drama professor Tom Lindblade says, “If you’re a teacher or a student and you’re really anal about your space, this is not for you!”

Cornerstone by the numbers

• $33,400,000 = total project cost• 200,000 = numbers of man-hours worked• 72,419 = the building’s total square feet• 24,000 = cubic yards of soil excavated• 8,600 = weight, in tons, of the 4,250 cubic yards of concrete poured for the building• 869 = tons of steel installed• 451 = seating capacity of the main auditorium• 106 = seating capacity of the screening room• 100 = greatest number of construction workers on the site at any one time• 92 = seating capacity of Studio A• 35 = number of subcontractors who worked for builder M.A. Mortenson on the project• 33.5 = height, in feet, of main space ceiling• 3 = number of stories (floors)

Who’s Edith?Edith Kinney Gaylord, whose name is etched in the stone outside the new building, was a CC alum, journalist, CC charter trustee, a member of the family that owns The Broadmoor hotel and a dedicated arts and education philanthropist.She died in 2001.

Not just one art

Hang around the Cornerstone enough, and you’re sure to hear the word “interdisciplinary” tossed around. It’s a key part of CC’s approach to education and a key part of the building’s mission. It means that when you study something, you’re going to learn about it from multiple perspectives. A music student working in the center’s digital editing lab might strike up a conversation with a film student working on her senior film project. The film student asks the music student: “Hey, do you want to score my film?”

More upcoming eventsNow that Colorado College has the performing arts facility it has wanted for so long, the focus is on filling its varied spaces with interesting and free events designed to attract Springs residents. Here are some upcoming highlights:Today-SundayProject Bandaloop will swing and dance on the walls of the building for the grand opening ceremonies. (7 p.m. today, 9 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday)

Oct. 17

Free lecture by Becky Smith, director of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” on “The Reality of Reality TV,” a behind-the-camera look at developing and shooting reality television. (7 p.m.)

Oct. 26

Free lecture by New York Times op-ed columnist and cultural critic Frank Rich on “Art, Culture and Politics.” Rich will share his insights and critiques about 21st-century politics in an era of mass media, blogs, celebrity culture and the arts. (7 p.m.)

Dec. 9

Free Chamber Orchestra Concert: The students of Colorado College will perform their winter concert under the direction of orchestra director Daniel Brink. (7:30 p.m.) For more information on events, visit www.ColoradoCollege.edu/news_events/ and click on Event Calendar on the left side of the page, or call 389-6607.

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