Gund Partnership: A Unique Expression
Exhibition currently in development
“…What has sustained our interest and enthusiasm is the constant challenge of creating an individual and unique expression for each client with new materials and forms…”
– Graham Gund
The Fine Art Museum will feature an exhibition of conceptual drawings, design research notations, renderings, elevations, blueprints, photographs, and building models of Gund Partnership award winning architectural designs, including the Fine and Performing Art Center. In addition, the exhibition will feature a selection of contemporary art in a variety of media from the personal collection of Graham Gund.
Gund Partnership of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is an award-winning professional practice, which provides services in architecture, planning and interior design. Founded in 1971, the firm has been honored with more than 100 national and regional awards for design excellence and has received wide critical acclaim and professional recognition for its work.
Over the course of its 30-year history, Gund Partnership has developed a national reputation as a leading designer of facilities for arts and education, working extensively with colleges, universities, and secondary schools in the United States, as well as with a wide array of cultural institutions. Contemporary art in all its varied forms and processes continues to be an inspiration and a personal passion for Graham Gund, firm founder, often serving a direct influence and point of reference for architectural concepts and design resolutions.
The design for the new 122,000 square foot Fine & Performing Arts Center is the result of Gund Partnership’s bold interpretation of the grandeur of the Great Smoky Mountains, truly moved after firm key staff visited the Joyce Kilmer National Forest, and intensely inspired by the spiritual and cultural home of the Cherokee. As significant was the architect’s profound experience of Western North Carolina’s uniquely complex regional history, diverse mountain culture, and vernacular architecture, that moved Gund Partnership and to design the monumental Arts Center design, as majestic as the mountains.
Situated in Western North Carolina’s lush and temperate Cullowhee Valley, the site of several principal early Cherokee settlements, the Fine & Performing Arts Center features numerous Cherokee inspired design elements such as a main atrium tile floor design of a seven pointed star representing the seven Cherokee clans. Also featured are prominent Cherokee decorative motifs in the performance hall, and bilingual signage throughout the facility using English and the Cherokee syllabary, the unique alphabet created in 1809 by Sequoyah, noted Cherokee historical figure.
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