CFA Production Center
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Photo by Eric Laignel
State-of-the-art. For the arts.
The College of Fine Arts Production Center at BU allows our students to work in a real-world high-tech laboratory space, allowing them to envision their future work in design and production after graduating.
We’ve got 27,000 square feet of design and production facilities, including a state-of-the-art Light and Sound lab, scenery, paint, prop, and costume shops.
The 310-foot-long production wing includes high-bay spaces for constructing, painting, and moving scenery and sets.
Also, the scene shop and paint shop are separated by 24-foot high moveable air-walls, which pull back to double the workspace for large-scale sets and connect to a corridor for easy loading into the theatre, or onto trucks for shows off-site.
Did we also mention… more than 60 design studio stations, 36 drafting tables, and two smart classrooms?
The CFA Production Center stands next to BU’s Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre. This bold modern structure encourages innovation, sparks cross-disciplinary collaborations, unifies the Performance and Design & Production programs of the School of Theatre, and invites the BU community and beyond to interact with theatre performance.
By The Numbers
SUNDAY IN THE BOOTH WITH GEORGE
CFA magazine feature
The musical Sunday in the Park with George is inspired by the famous 19th-century pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat.
Productions of the Pulitzer Prize– and Tony Award–winning show by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim typically have sets that mimic Seurat’s colorful painting. But for the CFA performances of Sunday in the Park at BU’s Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre, director Clay Hopper (CFA’05) and scenic designer Cristina Todesco (CFA’94,’09) took a very different approach—one specifically adapted to the Booth’s black box theater.
In the summer 2024 issue of CFA magazine, get a behind-the-scenes look at how BU technical production and scene design students brought Hopper and Todesco’s vision to life.
Honored.
Booth Theatre and the CFA Production Center were designed by internationally-recognized Elkus | Manfredi Architects. This theatre arts complex was one of the last projects that internationally acclaimed architect and urban designer Howard Elkus designed before he passed away. The construction of this complex was managed by the Bond Brothers.
Students get so much more out of the experience [of working in the CFA Production Center] because they can spend the time and spread out. They are going to walk out of here with serious experience.”
