The Center of Mesa Revitalization

The Mesa Arts Center's path to defining the identity of downtown Mesa through economic and cultural revitalization.

When walking through downtown Mesa, the relatively small-scale streets and buildings have a quaint feeling that does not hint at Arizona's largest arts center sitting squarely downtown on Main and Center Street.  However, once you get within a block of the Mesa Arts Center, the site becomes apparent from any direction.  With tall glass canopies, blue border walls, rows of trees, and large theaters standing at its heart, the Mesa Arts Center cannot be missed.  Aside from its architecture, the art banners, show advertisements, and people milling about are sure to garner any attention the complex may not have gathered on its own.  The Mesa Arts Center is a massive complex covering seven acres, with four theaters, five galleries, and fourteen art studios.  The center is 212, 755 square feet encompassing all of the theaters and studios, with about 5,500 square feet of art exhibit space.  The five galleries compose the Mesa Contemporary Arts (MCA) Museum.  The four theaters are the Ikeda Theater, the Virginia G. Piper Repertory Theater, the Nesbitt/Elliott Playhouse Theater, and the Anita Cox Farnsworth Studio Theater.  The Mesa Arts Center hosts various events, from classical music concerts to art classes, lectures, and cultural celebrations, across their campus.

The presence of the Mesa Arts Center in the middle of downtown Mesa is not by convenience or happenstance; it was chosen to be an integral part of creating a new Mesa.  The term 'revitalization' frequently appears in discussions about the city's changes, and it has for the past two decades.  Mesa was once one of the most successful downtowns in Arizona.  It hosted the largest movie palace in Arizona just down the street, a plethora of businesses and restaurants, and more and more people every year.  However, after the Second World War, the population growth that brought the city more people also brought those people further out.  The historical boundaries of downtown Mesa are relatively small, only about a mile each.  After World War II, the proliferation of suburbs pushed people further and further away from the city's center.  The effect on downtown Mesa was devastating.  By the 1950s and 1960s, businesses had closed, and shopping centers designed for the newly thriving suburbs threatened most businesses that had managed to stay afloat.  These effects changed the culture and reputation of Mesa for decades, and only recently have they begun to see change.  The implementation of the Mesa Arts Center was designed to bring people, life, and activity back into the city.  It was strategically placed at the exact place people get off the light rail, and it is accessible from every side of the street.  It not only plays a dominant role in its immediate surrounding landscape but has also shaped the changing dynamics between the people of Mesa and the idea of what the city should be. 

The Mesa Arts Center does an undeniably excellent job of advertising itself.  The center is a work of art that is evident from the street.  This is not by accident.  Every aspect of the arts center was designed to be inviting, artistic, and stimulating.  Martha Schwartz's idea for the landscape was a shadow walk, "a place where the rich interplay of overlapping shadows, trees, and architectural canopies creates a cool and inviting environment." Colored glass canopies, boulders, a water system mimicking southwest waterways, banquet tables, textured trees, and other features were chosen to make the arts center not only accessible but intriguing.  Just walking the grounds without ever going into any of the buildings that make up the complex becomes an artistic experience.  Designing the entirety of the Mesa Arts Center was a major artistic project, combining the work of Auerbach Pollock Friedlander, McKay Conant Brook Inc., Paragon Structural Design, Martha Schwartz Inc., and Lowry Sorenson Wilcoxson.

The entirety of the complex was designed with the goals of accessibility, functionality, and sustainability.  The art galleries and studios were placed around the edges of the center to put activity on the main streets, and the theaters were placed at the heart of the campus to draw people into the center.  The Mesa Arts Center was also designed to be as sustainable as possible, using thick walls, solar shading, placing the museum below grade, and even the exterior water feature reminiscent of arroyos works to temper the climate.  The center took inspiration from several natural features to become a more sustainable complex, from the arroyos cooling component to using angles of the buildings to mimic the cooling characteristics of desert canyons and shade canopies.  Even within the buildings, like in the ceramic studios where artist Jeff Reich helped to design a sloped studio floor to trench drain and shade sails to protect the kilns to create state of the art facilities and a modern, efficient, and sustainable complex.

It is not only the physical aspects of the center that make it accessible but how it interacts with its community, which has become one of the central focuses of the center.  Executive Director of the Mesa Arts Center, Cindy Ornstein, described this, saying "My view of the arts is that it is fantastic to offer exhibitions and performances... but that if you don't look to figure out how you create accessible points for all different people, if you don't figure out how to welcome the community in and give them ownership over some of the programming, if you don't make sure there are different ways for people from different ways and walks of life than you end up not serving the community needs as you should." The center's interaction with the community has significantly increased in the last eleven years, going from limited interactions of community engagement to a thriving dynamic of programs, festivals, and classes designed to give the people of the city ownership of the Mesa Arts Center. 

Building this complex was a vast project and required funding of about 90.8 million in construction costs and about 95 million total, a massive expense with what should be an even greater payout.  The Mesa Arts Center is an intelligently constructed and booming art complex.  Still, it represents something even bigger, a rebirth of Mesa, with arts at the center.  One of the architects of the project, Michael Tingley, explains the larger implications of the center, "A fundamental strategy for the Mesa Arts Center project was to create a new image and identity for the city of Mesa in the twenty-first century that would spur economic investment in the downtown core.  Transitioning this suburban community into a sustainable city for a new millennium requires establishing a sense of place, pride, and identity".  The Mesa Arts Center is the culmination of this idea for a new Mesa, an economic and cultural renovation designed to reinvent the city's image and reputation.  A project this significant physically and economically always has conflict.  Still, it took almost no time for the center's impact to become apparent.  From 2000 to 2005, the local economic impact of arts and culture went from 18.1 million to more than 47.57 million.  In five years, the event-related spending from visitors outside of Maricopa County grew tenfold.

The Mesa Arts Center is clearly one of a kind, utterly unique in its design and architecture, and impact on the surrounding landscape.  Unlike other cities in the valley, the face of downtown Mesa has not been dominated by skyscrapers and office buildings.   Mesa has a complicated history, a once thriving downtown slowly dying down as suburbanization pushed people outwards.  As people return, the downtown is reminiscent of the old-timey downtown.  Still, it has begun to see the changes of urbanization.  The Mesa Arts Center is a part of this phenomenon of returning life to downtown, but rather than overwhelm its landscape; the center is designed to add to it.  The center looks incredibly different from its surrounding buildings, but rather than look out of place, it appears as a focal point.  Its wide breadth and posture over its neighbors are eye-catching but not so large that it seems out of scale.  Whereas the opaque glass of the rectangle buildings that dominate other downtowns are uninviting, every possible entrance to the Mesa Arts Center is designed to bring people in, with pathways to guide you and colorful panels to beckon you forward from the streets of Mesa and into its immersive experience of art and culture. 

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