A Former KKK Auditorium in Fort Worth Is Being Recast as a Centre for Arts and Healing
Studio Barnes, ch_studio and GFF propose an adaptive-reuse project that turns a site of racial terror into a civic arts destination.
Studio Barnes, ch_studio and GFF have revealed plans to transform a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas, into the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing. The planned 35,000-square-foot project would convert the building at 1012 N. Main Street into a cultural and civic facility with exhibition galleries, performance spaces, dance facilities, community rooms, a tool library and makerspace. Construction is scheduled to begin in summer 2027, with an opening targeted for winter 2028, according to the project team.
The building is being redeveloped by Transform 1012 N. Main Street, a coalition-led initiative that acquired the property in 2021. Its location between Fort Worth’s Historic Northside and downtown gives the project an unusually direct urban presence: the building occupies a route that Black and other targeted communities historically had to pass while moving between the two areas. The proposal therefore treats the site not as an isolated relic, but as part of the city’s everyday geography.
Architecture with a difficult address
Construction on the original auditorium began in 1924 for Ku Klux Klan Klavern No. 101. The building was later damaged by fire and rebuilt, then passed through a succession of civic and commercial uses, including a dance-marathon venue, concert hall, wrestling arena and pecan warehouse. It has been vacant since 1999. Transform 1012 describes it as one of the last remaining purpose-built KKK buildings in the United States, a physical reminder of how architecture can embody intimidation, exclusion and racial power.
That history makes the project more demanding than a conventional cultural conversion. Adaptive reuse usually asks how an existing structure can accommodate a new programme. Here, the question is also how a new programme can remain legible against the building’s original meaning. Erasing every trace of the past would risk producing a clean but evasive object. Preserving the structure without changing its social role would leave the architecture’s violence intact.
The emerging approach appears to sit between those extremes. The design preserves the historic shell while introducing a new interior framework and a public passageway intended to make the building more visible and accessible. Portions of the original facade and graffiti are to remain, according to The Projects Group, which is managing the project. These elements are not neutral decoration; they can operate as evidence, keeping the building’s material history present while its civic function changes.
From sealed auditorium to public framework
Transform 1012’s preliminary programme distributes the project across several forms of public life. Exhibition galleries are intended to address social justice, civil rights and race relations in North Texas, including the story of Fred Rouse, a Black man lynched by a white mob in Fort Worth in 1921. Meeting spaces would support racial-equity and leadership training, while a theatre and event space would host local and touring artists and groups working across culturally specific and socially engaged practices.
Other proposed spaces extend the definition of an arts centre. A dance studio and rehearsal room would support underserved young people and early-career performers. Story booths in the lobby and galleries would allow visitors to record their own accounts of Fort Worth and the region. An amphitheatre and public park are intended to shift the site from secrecy and exclusivity toward gathering and exchange. A tool library, makerspace and marketplace would connect cultural activity to skills, small business development and local access to resources. These details remain part of a preliminary programme and may change as the design develops.
The breadth of the proposal is significant. It suggests that the project is not being conceived as a museum with a supplementary community room, but as a layered civic infrastructure in which memory, performance, education, making and economic participation overlap. The building’s future identity would depend less on a single monumental gesture than on the quality of its thresholds: how easily residents can enter, linger, contribute and return.
Designing for visibility and participation
The project’s stated ambition is to turn a site associated with coercion into a place of connection. That intention has architectural consequences. A building once used to stage racial hierarchy must become porous rather than forbidding, with circulation that invites discovery instead of reinforcing separation. The proposed passageway, public landscape and outdoor performance areas are therefore as important as the enclosed cultural rooms.
This emphasis also reflects the project’s community-led process. The architect selection was organised through what the project describes as “Redesigning the Design Competition,” a process that prioritised equity, transparency and public accountability. Studio Barnes and ch_studio lead the design, with GFF serving as architect of record; the wider team includes specialists in theatre planning, structural engineering and landscape architecture. The model places decision-making and interpretation alongside technical delivery, acknowledging that the project’s success cannot be measured only through construction quality.
Material reuse forms another part of that argument. The project team says that more than 195 tons of material have been diverted from landfills through selective demolition and partnerships with local organisations. That figure has not been independently verified, but the underlying strategy is clear: demolition is being treated as a process of sorting, documentation and potential reuse rather than simple removal. In a building whose meaning is bound to its physical remnants, material stewardship can become both an environmental measure and a method of historical reading.
What the project could change
The Fred Rouse Center will not undo the history attached to 1012 N. Main Street. Its value will depend on whether the finished building allows that history to be understood without allowing it to determine who feels welcome there. The project’s proposed galleries, performance spaces, classrooms, gardens and workspaces offer a broad platform, but programming, governance and long-term access will ultimately shape its public meaning.
For adaptive reuse, the scheme is a useful test of architecture’s reparative claims. It shows how preservation can be active rather than nostalgic, and how a historically charged building can be redesigned through use, visibility and participation. The goal is not to make the past disappear. It is to place the evidence of the past inside a living civic structure, where culture can help a city confront what its architecture has previously made visible, normal or unavoidable.
Sources
Dezeen · Transform 1012: The Building · The Projects Group · KERA News
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