Set In Stone - A Look at Cultural Center Building
This study of cultural building began in 2006 as a response to inquiries from arts consultants who had for some time been working on dozens of building projects across the country and found themselves confronting the same sets of problems with each new client. In many cases, the actual need for a new facility had not been demonstrated (even though there was often great enthusiasm about getting underway with construction); the connection between a new facility and delivering more effectively on mission was in many instances quite murky; realism about how a new facility could be sustained once built was frequently missing – both in terms of the financial resources and staff needed to successfully run a new facility. The list goes on. New facilities would open, organizations would then run into financial problems because of insufficient revenue, or an inadequate endowment, or because they couldn't service the debt they incurred to build, or because the building was too costly to operate, or it turned out to be beyond the organization's capacity to administer and sustain.
