United States site instead?
The new Wattstar Educational and Entertainment Facility will be a state-of-the-art feature and specialty films house, the first theater built in Watts in more than 35 years.
Wattstar will be a much-needed entertainment and cultural resource and place for life-long learning for Watts residents of all ages. It will also serve as an anchor for redevelopment in the community.
The Watts neighborhood has long suffered from a lack of industry and office-related land use. The Wattstar project will provide:
- A first-class motion picture theater
- Access to the arts culture and educational opportunities
- Digital technologies to transmit and receive global programming
- Job training and entrepreneurial education
The second floor of the complex will feature two 300-seat auditoriums. The first floor will include facilities to educate and train young people in the video, film production, post production, animation, music editing, web and graphics design and business development. Other features will include distance learning and teleconferencing to more than one million people.
Wattstar was designed by Behr Browers Architects of California using Graphisoft’s Archicad. According to Andrew Althaus, the firm’s vice president and director of operations, using
Building Information Modeling (BIM) enabled his staff to design, shape and edit their building model intuitively in three dimensions. “Having a 3D BIM model has been worth its weight in gold,” he said. “But it also provides a bridge to our 2D environment, enabling us to easily create any 2D drawing from the same 3D model. We can better collaborate with everyone involved in the project, and easily communicate changes to our client.”
