In December 2024, Urban opened its newest facility, the Performing Arts + Community Center (PACC), which spans 18,000 square feet and cost the school $36 million. The PACC features a recording studio, spacious dressing rooms, a raisable hydraulic stage and more than 90% sound insulation between floors. It offers an elevated alternative to the small black-box Gumption Theater.
Transforming the St. Agnes gym into a versatile new building was no small feat. What began as a vision two decades ago evolved into a six-month design period and a 20-month construction process.
The PACC was a long time coming, but the Salkind Center, completed in 2017, was a necessary step before the PACC was built so that Urban would still have a gym space. “[The architects and previous leadership team] planned a gym and the theater at the same time, knowing they would need [to build] a new gym in order to [turn] the old gym into the theater,” Head of School Dan Miller said. “Though, the actual PACC ended up being a much more extensive project than [we] anticipated then.”
The original project only included the ground-level theater, a few classrooms and offices. But Urban raised enough money to excavate below the building, making room for the recording studio, music studio, dressing room and additional offices. When Miller joined the project, he took inspiration from other schools’ theaters to improve upon the original design. “The idea of lining the interior of the space with the wood and dark fabrics to create a [sense of] comfort, invitation and intimacy, … the inspiration for that [came from] a theater at Harvard University called Sanders Theater,” Miller said.
Miller and Director of Development Anna Lee worked closely with Studio Bondy architects and Cahill Construction contractors to reimagine the gym, considering the priorities of Urban’s performing arts students.
One of these needs is a flexible stage theater that facilitates theatrical and musical performances. “The PACC stage consists of 30-something individual platforms, which means they can go up and down individually,” said Igor Zagatsky, director of information services.
According to Zagatsky, this configuration opens up opportunities for theatrical trap doors or a thrust stage, where the middle panels pop out to create a closer front stage. In last year’s winter musical, “Alice By Heart,” the band hid away in the loft above the Gumption Theater’s stage. This placement made the musicians nearly invisible and left them cramped, making it difficult to perform comfortably. This year’s production of the musical “Grease” will have a band pit — a setup where the musicians are in front of the stage.
“[With the PACC’s flexible stage,] we can have the musicians in the pit band be down at a lower level. … We actually get to have a pit band … in a pit!” Performing Arts Department Chair, jazz band director and music teacher Scott Foster said.
The flexible stage can also open up extra stage space or seating room. “We wanted to maximize capacity,” Miller said. “We also wanted enough space to accommodate the entire performing arts department … [and] a space for community gatherings of all kinds.” While the Gumption Theater has a maximum capacity of 100, the PACC has a maximum capacity of 431.
Because classes and various performances will take place in the PACC, the building is equipped with sound-dampening rooms. The theater is built with thick walls and grooved wood all throughout, giving it 90% sound insulation.
“We wanted the sound insulation to be good enough that you could actually rehearse in all three [floors] at the same time,” Miller said.
Urban’s administration went above and beyond to select the brand-new equipment that furnishes the PACC. “We did not cut corners, because we want the equipment to last a long time,” Lee said.
The PACC features upgraded technological equipment, including multiple microphone controls, surround sound speakers and a projector screen. “From the soundboards to the microphones and the lighting, the technologies are really sophisticated,” Miller said.
Included in the new technology are new cameras in the theater. “There are two cameras that are built into this space,” Zagatsky said. “One that records the whole stage and sends that image down to the dressing rooms, so [the actors] can see what’s happening [onstage]. [The other is] an infrared camera that can basically see in the dark, which would be helpful for the stage manager.”
The first static camera allows performances to be streamed to the PACC’s lobby and dressing rooms. This helps the stage manager to recognize cues during blackouts, which can otherwise be very tricky as it is hard to see when actors are in place for the next scene in total darkness. The additional cameras will aid both the actors and the stage manager in timing their cues.
The PACC theater has an overhead tension grid — strong steel ropes arranged in a grid above the stage — which are sturdy enough to hold two people per square foot. “The tension grid is kind of the crown jewel and makes lighting much more accessible to students,” Theater Technical Director and PACC Manager Claudio Silva said.
In the Gumption Theater, students previously had to climb tall ladders to reach the overhead lights, which hung 20 feet above the stage. Now, with the installation of a tension grid, accessing the light fixtures is much easier and safer. “[The tension grid] allows us to teach a theater design class, which allows easy and safe access to the [light fixtures],” Zagatsky said.
Though the PACC theater’s new features in equipment and expanded space are exciting, adjusting and fully discovering how to use the equipment may take time. “From my own experiences [of] opening new spaces, [in] the first year to year and a half of using the space, you’re gonna find its quirks,” Silva said.
While the theater’s features are being fine-tuned, the community center aspect of the PACC is also undergoing adjustments to better meet the Urban’s needs. Lee said, “We’re learning a lot about how to use the building. There are questions about where people tend to sit. Do people know where the bathrooms are? What signage do we need? Or when people come late, where do they go?”
The finished PACC building opened up many opportunities for Urban’s community, but its creation was no easy task. “It would have been a lot easier to demolish [the St. Agnes gym] and build straight up, but there was a lot of heat on keeping it,” designer Bill Bondy from Studio Bondy Architecture said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.
Miller explained why the leadership team wanted to preserve the original building’s outer structure. “This neighborhood has historic integrity, and you don’t want to violate the integrity by tearing down a building,” he said. “The building itself is owned by St. Agnes — the Archdiocese of San Francisco — [so] we would have had to get permission to tear it down, which might have been challenging.”
Even while preserving the original structure of the St. Agnes gym, the PACC has a lot of new opportunities to offer the Urban community. “We’re making history. This is going to be a historical moment, and to be part of that, to witness it and just to feel what that feels like — I’m almost tearing up right now thinking about it,” Foster said. “It’s really exciting.” ◼