Austin's premiere contemporary arts center, Arthouse presents cutting-edge international exhibitions and programs.

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Arthouse creates meaningful opportunities to investigate and experience the art of our time through exhibitions, programs and commissions of new work.

Arthouse at the Jones Center is located at 700 Congress Avenue in Downtown Austin. Arthouse is closed temporarily for an extensive renovation and expansion designed by Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis and will reopen October, 2010.

go to Arthouse at Jones Center home page

700 Congress Avenue, 78731
(512) 453-5312
Wed 12-11; Thu-Sat 12-9; Sun 12-5

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A fresh and innovative renovation that will add a new layer to a many-layered historical downtown building will be unveiled at a news conference today announcing Arthouse's $6 million renovation plans for its 14,000-square-foot building at 700 Congress Ave., known as the Jones Center.

The current plans call for renovations to the building's facade and interior spaces. The majority of the building's exterior will be perforated by more than 160 laminated glass blocks designed to let light into windowless interior areas such as offices. At street level, the current floor-to-ceiling glass windows and awning -- both added when the building was converted to a department store -- will be enlarged, and a dramatic new lobby and entrance will be located on Congress Avenue. The new awning will be able to suspend artwork and will contain audio speakers.
-- Austin American-Statesman, March 19, 2008

And that phase is quite stunning, with an inventive design that is playful and elegant, that acknowledges the building's past as Hegman's Queen Theater and Lerner Shops department store while completely embracing its present and future identity as a home for contemporary art. The entry into the building shifts to the north, closer to the Congress Avenue sidewalk, and what had been exhibition space facing the street becomes a new glassed-in lobby dominated by a suspended staircase that leads to a spacious new gallery on the second floor. (The first floor will retain exhibition space in the form of two galleries behind the lobby, and Arthouse staff will also keep their first-floor offices.) An integral part of the second-story Main Gallery is a panel 13 feet high and 70 feet long suspended on steel tracks so that it can be moved across the gallery, subdividing the space in various ways and exposing the bare brick wall, where vestiges of the building's earlier incarnations may be seen: the Queen Theater balcony and plaster work, the Lerner Shops paint.
-- Austin Chronicle, March 21, 2008