The award-winning Weber Fine Arts Building, a 78,500 square feet structure designed to be an "inhabited sculpture on campus.”
The School’s three disciplines are housed under one roof in the award-winning Del and Lou Ann Weber Fine Arts Building, “Weber,” for short.
Ours is a special building.
Famed, yet initially controversial for its long curving spine, UNO’s Fine Arts building is a playful post-modern structure that inspires the imagination by combining visual references across time: Medieval pinnacled towers and “flying buttresses,” allusions to an English renaissance thatched roof, and iconic square windows from the modern age.
Its stone structure suggests human involvement with history, especially in its unique combination of steel, concrete, clinker bricks from local beehive kilns, Minnesota limestone and South Dakota granite, all of which exude a sense of continuity and longevity.
There are beautiful and generous studio spaces for book arts and letter press, papermaking, drawing, painting, printmaking, stage acting, directing, costume construction, scenic and prop construction, and several spaces for creative writing.
One modestly-sized lecture hall and several intimate seminar rooms ensure that students experience engaged learning at every turn. Finally, four computer labs for graphic design, game design, media arts, and theatrical design, include state of the art equipment that encourages innovation and prepares students for the future.
Sculpture and ceramics classes are held in a free standing 5500 square foot studio directly across the street from the Weber Fine Arts Building. Sculpture shop spaces are equipped to handle wood, metals, plaster, and new media. Ceramics has eight wheels, three kilns, and a glaze room. These programs embrace traditional media while supporting experimentation and innovation.
At the ceremony during which the Fine Arts building was officially named for Del and Lou Ann Weber, then Chancellor Emeritus Weber said of the building, noting its early controversy, “I believe that it will stand the test of time. …The building speaks to the need for the aesthetic in our lives, for the role of the arts in the human quest and to the truism that if any university is to be worthy of the name, it must do more than help a person earn a living. It must also elevate their spirit.”
We are proud to say that the building has indeed stood the test of time, and it helps our programs in Art, Theatre and Creative Writing elevate spirits every day.