An open-air mass timber theatre carrying 475 seats under a curved glulam grid shell has been completed in Garrison, New York for Hudson Valley Shakespeare, with Studio Gang’s Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center targeting LEED Platinum as a first for a purpose-built US theatre.
The 14,850 square foot (1,380 square metre) venue establishes Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s first permanent home, replacing 39 years of seasonal productions inside a tent at the nearby Boscobel House and Gardens after construction began on the new site in October 2024. Bringing actors, audiences and back-of-house together under one roof for the first time, the building also extends the company’s performance season beyond what the seasonal tent could accommodate.
The timber-framed grid shell, a single sweeping canopy supported on prefabricated A-frame timber columns, was engineered by Thornton Tomasetti with mass timber design assistance from Quebec-based fabricator Art Massif and built by construction manager Consigli, which has delivered more than 20 cross-laminated timber and glulam projects across the Northeast US. The concentric glulam geometry shelters the auditorium without enclosing it, with the proscenium arch beneath framing direct views across the Hudson River towards Storm King Mountain, Snake Hill and Breakneck Ridge.
Targeting LEED Platinum, the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center will be the first purpose-built theatre in the United States to achieve the rating, with mass timber and material strategies cutting Global Warming Potential by 24 per cent and passive design and active systems reducing overall energy use by 50 per cent against the standard baseline. Rainwater reuse and efficient fixtures cut water consumption by 78 per cent, with rooftop photovoltaic panels supplying roughly 10 per cent of the building’s energy load.
The wood structure replaced what the design team had originally explored as a tensile fabric tent, with Studio Gang rejecting that path on embodied-carbon grounds before iterating towards the timber frame that now defines the building. “We thought it could be a sort of tent,” Gang told Architectural Record.
Founded in 1987 and previously known as the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, the theatre company relocated to the 98-acre Garrison site in 2022 on land conveyed by philanthropist and conservationist Christopher Davis. Support pavilions clad in yakisugi, a charred Japanese cedar, house the rehearsal studios, dressing rooms, offices and concessions that the company has never previously had under a permanent roof.
The landscape transition has been led by Nelson Byrd Woltz, whose Senior Principal, Thomas Woltz, has overseen the rewilding of the former golf course into native meadow and wetland habitat across nearly 14 acres of new planting and 250 native or adaptive trees. “Our design celebrates the natural beauty of this extraordinary site,” Woltz said.
The opening season at the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center runs from June to September 2026 with a production of King Lear, with Hudson Valley Shakespeare publicly committed to carbon neutrality by 2040 across the full 98-acre campus.
