By Victoria Walsh, Perkins&Will Architect and Associate Principal, and Katlyn Blong, Perkins&Will Architect, Senior Project Manager, and Senior Associate
Radical love isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when considering a renovation project. But spend a minute listening to the Alliance Theatre’s Jennings Hertz Artistic Director Christopher Moses reflect on lessons learned from the Woodruff Arts Center’s multi-year field trip study participation and you will be swept up in a shared dream. If exposure to the arts improves mental health and academic performance, then designing spaces for art is essential. Thus, the Goizueta Stage for Youth & Families was born from love. It’s a courageous commitment to our children, our community, and our future.
The Rich Theatre, circa 1955, had long been buried, obscured by decades of renovations. The room was inaccessible, inflexible, uninspiring, and underutilized. Our charge was to bring it back to life. But it wasn’t only the theater that felt inaccessible. The Memorial Arts Building itself turned inward, with no open entrance on Peachtree Street. It was difficult to find, harder to enter, and often perceived as a place where children were expected to sit still and behave. The solution begins at the threshold. A new, visible, and welcoming entrance operates on both practical and symbolic levels, removing physical barriers while softening the sense of intimidation that can accompany a formal arts campus. It signals, clearly and immediately, that this is a place for everyone.
From there, we performed architectural open-heart surgery—carefully dismantling the Rich Theatre and constructing a new, acoustically contained “box-in-box” structure within the existing building, all without interrupting ongoing programs. Floors were realigned and the in-between spaces reclaimed, creating a continuous, legible path of travel that makes the entire environment accessible and intuitive for artists, audiences, and staff.
The Goizueta Stage is built for flexibility—and it works hard. Every element is purposeful, with some doing double duty so the theater can transform with ease. It can shift from an end-stage performance in the morning, to an in-the-round configuration in the afternoon, and a flat-floor gala by evening. An integrated electroacoustic system supports each of these arrangements, precisely tuning the space to deliver optimal sound in every configuration.
From the second floor, a network of spaces—the Bernie & Billi Marcus Sensory Room, sound porch, control room, and accessible catwalks—reworks the theater to be visible and available. Together, they reveal performance as a collective act. Not just actors on a stage, but lighting designers, technicians, stage managers, and fabricators all shaping the experience. By opening these layers of production, the design invites curiosity and expands the definition of who can belong in the arts.
By designing a space that celebrates accessibility, flexibility, curiosity—and, ultimately, love—the Goizueta Stage for Youth & Families signals a new era for the Woodruff Arts Center. An era in which Atlanta models what it means to make the arts truly welcoming: improving lives through exposure, building a pipeline of talent, and cultivating future audiences. The stage is now home to youth and family programming thoughtfully curated by the Alliance Theatre and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
But what makes this love radical? The new design expands potential. The Woodruff Arts Center is doubling down through research, leadership in the Arts + Health Laboratory: Georgia’s NeuroArts Coalition, and sustained advocacy—helping to advance HR 1007, the first statewide legislative measure in the United States explicitly focused on leveraging the arts to address mental health.
Our impact as designers isn’t embedded in the structures we create, but in what those structures make possible. It is in the people they empower and the futures they help shape. Radical love, in this sense, is the fierce commitment and insistence that the arts are a vital, shared inheritance for us all.
This is sponsored content.
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