New building reflects WGBH's purpose

At 6:30 tomorrow morning, a huge electronic screen will light up over the Massachusetts Turnpike as the road bends toward Brighton. Photographs of dancers, leaping into the air, will tower over the highway.

It will be the premiere display of WGBH's digital mural, the most striking feature of the public broadcaster's $85 million new headquarters.

The idea of a new home was first raised about five years ago, said WGBH president Henry Becton Jr. The station had occupied 12 different buildings in Allston, some of them leased from Harvard or sitting on Harvard-owned land. But WGBH had outgrown its 1960s-era space and its outmoded technology, Becton said. And Harvard, planning its Allston expansion, wanted its buildings back.

The search for a new home, Becton said, led to an expansive new space at One Guest Street in Brighton, a 343,000-square-foot facility intended to help the public understand what is produced within - from radio reports to children's television shows to such PBS series as "Nova," "Frontline," and "Masterpiece Theatre."

In the Allston space, Becton said, "You had to go inside and wander upstairs and through narrow corridors" to get to the radio and television studios. The new building, he said, is designed to reveal the station's inner workings.

The building's main atrium, which will host receptions and gatherings, connects to one television studio through a pair of soundstage doors, which will be opened for special events. Windows onto Guest Street look into another TV studio, which holds the sets for the local public affairs shows "Greater Boston" and "Basic Black."

On one side of the atrium is a 200-seat auditorium, equipped with rear-screen captioning and descriptive audio for the hearing- and vision-impaired. Becton said the theater will be used for seminars, screenings, forums, and teacher training workshops.

On the other side of the atrium is a state-of-the-art music recording studio, equipped with a new Steinway and Sons piano and enough room to host an audience of 75.

Down the hall is the new newsroom and studio for the radio show "The World," with windows overlooking the street. The ceiling is marked with city names and longitudes, indicating places where the show has correspondents or can call on reporters from the BBC World Service.

Above the television studios are a series of servers that hold all of the station's digital content. An on-site archive includes footage from 30,000 radio and television shows, including early clips of Julia Child, a lecture on music appreciation by Leonard Bernstein, and footage of Senator John F. Kennedy announcing his run for president - on a show hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt.

The building was designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, which designed the Clinton Presidential Center in Arkansas. The television and radio production facilities were designed by Janson Design Group. The building will be certified by the US Green Building Council, Becton said. It is constructed of 90 percent recycled steel, with solar panels, motion-sensitive office lighting, UV-filtering glass, and waterless urinals and dual-flush toilets.

Funding for the building came from the sale of buildings and land to Harvard, as well as from a $28 million capital campaign, Becton said.

Now, Becton notes, the station will be literally wrapped in its mission statement, which is printed in relief type around one curved exterior wall. But far more visible to the public will be the 30-by-45-foot LED screen at the end of a two-story walkway that connects the production facilities at One Guest Street with more offices across the street.

Chris Pullman, WGBH's vice president of design, said planners wanted the new building's architecture to reflect the station's purpose. Once they devised the "connector," he said, they thought it would be a perfect spot for a display screen.

Becton said he intends the mural to be "a piece of public art that celebrates the western entrance to Boston." He likens it to the Sister Corita mural on the Boston Gas tank in Dorchester, a landmark on the city's southern border.

Every day, Becton said, a different image or series of images will appear, connected to an on-air offering. (At 7 p.m., the image will shift to a still shot of the night sky.) Information about the images and related programming will be available on the station's website, which is soliciting suggestions for photos to display. But the lineup for the first week is set.

In addition to the dancers, the images will include panoramic pictures of murals by the Mexican artist José Orozco, an image of the Cat's Eye Nebula taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, and cloud formations over Hawaii's Haleakala Crater.

Orozco "once said that the mural is the highest, most logical, and purest form of painting because it's intended to be viewed by all people, and not just a privileged few," Becton said. "Our hope is that our mural will fulfill a similar purpose."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to www.viewerdiscretion.net