Strathmore a great hall of suburbia

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Highbrow culture isn't just for cities anymore. Suburbia, home to subdivisions and shopping malls, is fast building the type of sophisticated arts centers traditionally located downtown. This cultural surge, fueled by suburban wealth and political power, is providing civic focus to sprawl.

Among the new facilities in the hinterlands is a $7.2 million arts complex near the massive Mall of America outside Minneapolis. Northwest of downtown Atlanta, the $106 million Cobb Galleria Performing Arts Center has broken ground.

In Orange County, south of Los Angeles, a 2,000-seat concert hall is being built next to an already thriving performing arts center.

Washington joins the trend with tonight's opening of the $100 million Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda. The 190,000-square-foot complex houses a concert hall more polished and intimate than many urban venues, including those at the Kennedy Center.

This elegant wood-paneled auditorium, a second home for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is the gem within an architectural setting that's appropriately suburban in demeanor -- low-slung, laid-back and linked to a parking garage.

Reflecting a less appealing face of suburbia -- atomization -- the hall's grand, public lobby isn't positioned as the communal heart of the building. Instead, it's sequestered at the farthest end like a McMansion on a cul-de-sac. Rather than coming together in a civic room, people are quickly channeled away from one another up separate staircases into their seats.

Part of this disconnection stems from the way the large music center is configured within Strathmore's 11-acre property. Boston architect William Rawn, who collaborated with Grimm & Parker Architects of Bethesda, didn't completely embrace the suburban-ness of the site. Instead of fronting the building on Rockville Pike as a roadside landmark, he tucked it behind Strathmore's Colonial Revival mansion, used as an arts center since 1983.

"On the road, it would have been no different than a shopping center," Mr. Rawn says. "Maintaining the green space on Rockville Pike says there's something special here. It gave us the opportunity to put a building in the landscape."

Taking advantage of the hilly parkland, the architect chose a less visible location in part to gain enough room for the 1,976-seat concert hall and educational wing. The large building is built into a steep slope so its height doesn't impinge on the 1902 mansion and adjacent gazebo.

Mirroring the rolling landscape are sinuously curved roofs, which add a lyrical note to an otherwise chunky structure. Although it creates a strong signature for the building, this bending profile is only fully appreciated from the mansion or walking paths around the site.