Ferguson Center for the Arts

Henry N. Cobb, of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, took the shell of the old Ferguson High School and built a performing arts centre around and behind it, so that a schoolhouse façade now fronts three theatres. The largest, the Diamonstein Concert Hall, seats 1,725 and was designed for unamplified orchestral sound; the Peebles Theater and a studio space take the smaller work. It opened at Christopher Newport University in September 2005 and became the presenting house for the Virginia Peninsula, receiving touring orchestras, opera companies and recitalists alongside the university's own theatre, music and dance departments, whose workshops, galleries and practice rooms fill the rest of the complex.