Playhouse

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Community Involvement | Concept | Projected Usage | Market Research | A City-Wide Cultural District

Imagine a major, cross-cultural arts and gathering facility at the crossroads of the new Downtown Bellevue. EastHUB is working with stakeholders across the arts and culture community as well as businesses, municipalities and philanthropists to make this dream a reality. The Playhouse is a planned $105M flexible-use cultural facility that has already received an historic $45M head start from the Cloudvue development and has a construction timeline currently slated for groundbreaking 18 months after Cloudvue begins its development. EastHUB has launched a fundraising campaign to raise the remaining $60M, with the need for $45M in pledged donations prior to groundbreaking.

Background

EastHUB was approached by representatives of the Cloudvue mixed-use development project in 2020 to explore the development and integration of a live performance venue on gifted land as a public amenity in the heart of their Downtown-Bellevue development site. The Cloudvue developer was aware of EastHUB’s goal to build and embed a network of shared cultural spaces, with integrated community input and engagement, throughout the Eastside by taking advantage of the current construction boom, and the partnership has proceeded steadily through the early stages of planning.  

EastHUB was thrilled to receive this unprecedented donation and honored to engage with our community to make this opportunity a reality based in the needs and gaps that exist in the Eastside arts and culture community.  

Community Involvement

EastHUB’s philosophy for shared spaces is rooted in community input and engagement. Instead of telling the community what we are giving them, we are asking them what they want and need, and working with them to realize it. Since late 2020, EastHUB has been focused on an intensive process of Community Engagement using principles of consensus organizing with local arts and culture organizations, as well as with a broader cross-section of Bellevue/Eastside major demographic groups, to determine the community’s expectations, needs, and requirements of a performance facility. This input is directly reflected in the preliminary design of the Playhouse, and we anticipate this process will continue throughout the design period up to the final stages of Design and Construction Documentation prior to the start of construction for the facility. 

Concept

EastHUB initially worked with a team of architects to develop an early-stage concept design for the proposed new performing arts facility that would focus on the highest possible degree of inbuilt flexibility and allow for multiple performance configurations and inexpensive transitions from event to event. The goal was to design an innovative facility intended for a mix of community use and programmed events to be active for up to 300 days each calendar year. The initial concept design process yielded a venue with up to 6 different performance configurations for audience capacities ranging between 250-seats to 1,000-seats.   

Projected Usage

The Playhouse will be a community center and magnet for cultural gatherings and events. The generous lobby and public spaces will serve as an activated community gathering space, and an exhibition/gallery space for artifacts and periodic installations that focus on the history of Bellevue and the Eastside. The auditorium/performance space will have the inbuilt capability to transition easily into a number of performance configurations, including:  

Market Research

With our research partner, AMS PLANNING & RESEARCH, EastHUB has conducted an initial review of existing cultural facilities on the Eastside. This research conclusively demonstrates that there is need in the marketplace for a wide variety of flexible use cultural and performance spaces ranging in size from practice rooms, storefront galleries, and single dance studios up to fully finished performance and exhibition spaces with flexible capacities up to 1,100 seats.   

A City-Wide Cultural District

EastHUB is an enthusiastic advocate for the construction of spaces suitable for cross-cultural programming and other types of cross-cultural interactions. The last two decades have gifted our region with substantial growth in both population and cultural diversity such that no single building or single neighborhood cultural area can satisfy the urgent need for cultural spaces, or appropriately contain the multitude of forms of cross-cultural expression. Therefore, EastHUB’s longer-term goal is a City-wide, 18-hour activated cultural district encompassing all of downtown Bellevue, with the Cloudvue Playhouse as its centerpiece.