Situated within the campus green of the college circle, Beardsley Meeting House provides the campus with 50,000 SF of dedicated theater space, administrative offices, additional classrooms.
Its centerpiece, the Gracie Theatre, is a 500-seat balconied theatre offering a comfortable, high-tech venue for a variety of productions and lectures, as well as a hands-on learning lab for students in Husson’s New England School of Communications (NESCom) program.
The spaces have been organized in order to provide programmatic adjacencies with clearly delineated zones for all three building components: theater, offices and classrooms. The three entities are concentrically arrayed about a central two story lobby and monumental stair providing additional space for casual performance, campus congregation, and display of college artifacts, images and histories.
In addition to housing “The Gracie,” Beardsley Meeting House provides academic classrooms and offices for the School of Science and Humanities and is home to Husson’s administrative offices.
The Beardsley Meeting House has become a touchstone for future development on campus, successfully resolving issues of place making, campus infrastructure, iconography and energy efficient design.