Nearly five years after a fire devastated the original Doris Duke Theatre in November 2020, the Jacob’s Pillow dance center in Becket, Massachusetts, inaugurates its replacement, connected to the place’s Native American heritage.

This irregular two-story timber construction is the work of the Dutch studio Mecanoo, founded by Francine Houben, in collaboration with the American firm Marvel. At approximately 1,800 square meters (more than doubling the size of its predecessor) the building presents a flexible performance hall that seats between 220 and 400 people, allowing multiple stage configurations and simultaneous uses.

The landscape design, also by Marvel, was developed in consultation with the interdisciplinary artist Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent. The theater is organized around the cardinal points, in accordance with an essential principle in indigenous worldviews. The garden to the east is dedicated to the ancestral wisdom and history of the Stockbridge-Munsee people, the region’s original inhabitants.

The building features key spaces like the Jameson foyer in the west wing, with an exhibition gallery, and the Forest Studio to the east, a multipurpose area for rehearsals and events. Clad in textured layers of heat-treated pine and built with solid wood, the theater blends with its natural environs, on a hillside on the edge of the Jacob’s Pillow campus.