This summer’s White Plaza renovations will not be the only changes to the Stanford landscape in coming years.

Plans are shaping up to transform the area surrounding the Cantor Center for Visual Arts into a diverse arts district over the next twenty to thirty years, according to Assistant Vice President for the Arts Karen Nagy.

The new arts district will feature a building adjacent to the Cantor Arts Center that will house the Department of Art and Art History and the Art and Architecture Library, as well as a new concert hall on the other side of Palm Drive near Frost Amphitheater.

The new art building will likely be built on the space currently occupied by the Old Anatomy building directly behind Cantor, according to University Architect David Lenox.

The Cummings Art Building, a facility across from the History Corner that currently houses the Art Department and Art Library, will likely be demolished to make way for a new Hoover Institution facility, Lenox said in an email to The Daily.

Nagy said the Art Department’s move will remedy the severe space crunch that has confronted the department in its current facility.

“Space has been so tight in Cummings that faculty have been bumped out to other buildings in the Quad,” Nagy said.

“We’re very much pushing out of the space we’re in already,” said Kristine Samuelson, chair of the Department of Art and Art History. “We need a lot more room to do the many things that we do, both in the studio and out, in classrooms and in screening rooms. Right now we’re housing three undergraduate majors, three M.F.A. programs and a doctoral program.”

The new art building, which will occupy about 90,000 square feet, “will house faculty offices, classrooms, film screening spaces, the digital art program, all the art studios and the art library,” Nagy said.

“We want to create a research lab space for students and researchers that offers access to digital media and digital resources in a space that has quiet spaces and public spaces, with a readily available and rich literature collection in the stacks,” said Art Librarian Peter Blank.

Blank said that he envisioned “the kinds of spaces that encourage people to come into the library,” including multimedia seminar rooms that could be used for student study groups or classes that want to utilize rare archival materials.

Nagy cautioned, however, that plans for the new Art Building were still at a very early stage. She said the next step will be a planning process with the Art Department “to design the academic and programmatic goals for the building and that’ll translate into a building program.”

“It will be a central place for the Art Department and the other things that we do,” Samuelson said. She added that increased collaboration between the Art Department and its new neighbor Cantor “will surely be part of the exciting conversations we’ll have.”

Lenox said in an email to The Daily that at this point in the planning process it is unclear whether the Old Anatomy building will be renovated or torn down to make way for the Art Building.

“As planning progresses and the program is solidified, we will have a better idea of what portions of Old Anatomy will be renovated and what part of the project will be housed in [a] new structure,” Lenox said.

Lenox indicated that the Old Anatomy building would have to be carefully studied before a decision could be made.

“Typically to renovate a building like Old Anatomy, one would evaluate the structure for historical significance, seismic, program adaptability, sustainability and cost,” Lenox said.

The other major component of the proposed Arts District is a new concert hall that will house 900 seats and will be used primarily as a music performance venue.

The concert hall will stand on the site of the Old Gymnasium, which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. The venue will face Cantor from across Palm Drive and will lie on an east-west axis with the museum and the new Art Building.

Most parties involved in the discussion about the new arts district agreed that the major buildings would go up well within the next decade. The concert hall would likely open by 2012, Nagy said.

Beyond the major construction, Nagy said, the arts district could grow to include a diverse array of facilities, including “a kind of connective path [between Cantor and the new concert hall], maybe with sculpture and small performance spaces, wandering through the Arboretum.”

Additional construction of arts facilities could be a twenty or thirty year plan, Nagy said.

“The idea is to try to move the academic and smaller performance spaces for music or drama into that area,” she said.