Founded in 1965, the University of Southern Indiana is a fairly young higher education facility with a drive for innovation. Only a few years after completing the renovation and expansion of its Student Center, which features a unique signature design of a 100-foot-high tower nicknamed “The Cone,” work began on a new adjoining Performance Center. Paying homage to native resources, the new building is constructed of local red sandstone — quarried at a small site 100 miles from the campus — providing a stunning complement to the Indiana limestone used for the design of the neighboring Student Center.
“We were selected six years ago for the Student Center project,” explained Malcolm Holzman, FAIA, partner at Holzman Moss Bottino Architecture in New York, NY. “There was an existing Student Center, vacant library and a new theater to be part of the project. They asked us to do drawings for the project early — almost at the same time as the Student Center — so it was ready to construct when the funding became available. The entire project was conceived together. There was a theater in downtown Evansville they used and a summer theater in New Harmony, which was about a half hour away, but a real Performance Center on campus did not exist.