EVEN A FEW WEEKS AGO, the huge space at 410 Terry Avenue North was filled with sawdust and the nervous energy that accompanies any major undertaking. By October 8, the temporary home of Seattle's new arts center will be literally transformed, overtaken by fiberglass sheep, "living" robots, and walls covered with hundreds of Mylar butterflies. This is Consolidated Works, Executive Director Matthew Richter's dream project that will bring together theater, film, visual art, music, and lectures in an ambitious gesture to blur distinctions between the disciplines, by curating, in Richter's words, "a consolidation of the best work in town under one roof."

Richter left his position as theater editor at The Stranger two years ago to pursue that goal. It's an idea that was formulated way back when he was running the multimedia performance and visual arts space Rm 608 in the early '90s, when he began to pay close attention to the crossover between the arts, to see the arts world as a whole. Stranger publisher Tim Keck joined that vision as a launch board member (he's since departed), and the board grew to add four others, including Director of Visual Arts Meg Shiffler, who envisions Consolidated as a place where "all of the spokes of the wheel are equally weighted."

Symbolizing most of those hopes in the current space is what Richter and Company call the Egg, the circular hub of the center of the space through which all entries and exits are made. From the middle of the Egg, you are immediately connected to the five different disciplines and offered five different choices, each with a separate identity that is also part of something larger. It's a physical representation of Consolidated's challenge to do something that's never really been done before: to fill in the blanks -- in one fell swoop -- that exist between Seattle's tiny arts venues and its high-end performance halls.

What would seem more daunting is that all this fuss is being made down on Terry for only a few months. Consolidated Works has to be moved to an as-yet unnamed location shortly after the whole thing has gotten on its feet -- the space has only been donated until it's demolished sometime early next year.

"We wanted to launch big; we didn't want to launch small," Shiffler says confidently. "[We wanted] to show people what we are, not what we will be."

"We built it here; we can build it anywhere," echoes Richter. "Yeah, it's been an incredible amount of work [for everybody], but it's a chance to show people what it is that we're going to do and not to show them just, 'Oooh, we got this enormous space.' The point is what we can do to that space. We're not an ensemble of artists, we're not a creating ensemble -- we are a producing ensemble, a curating ensemble. The point is, look at the shell that we can create."

The shell for their inaugural fall season houses what they've titled Artificial Life, a special thematic linking of all their art resources to discuss what Richter calls "the area bordered on one side by your definition of biological life and on the other side by your definition of reality." Starting with the Visual Arts opening on October 8 (that's where the artificial sheep, robots, and such come in), the consecutive weeks will expand to include Happy?, a commissioned new work by acclaimed local performance troupe the Compound, music performances by Octant and Lela Performance Ensemble, lectures on everything from philosophy and natural law to the Robot Olympics, and a film series featuring screenings like David Cronenberg's television-as-sex-object cult film, Videodrome, and the Seattle premiere of Harold Boihem's The Ad and the Ego, with sound design by Negativland. Perhaps more importantly, the works will enrich each other as well as their intended audiences, highlighting the first substantial Northwest showing of Sandy Skoglund's renowned butterfly installation next to underrepresented talent like futuristic artist Matt Steinke.

If Consolidated Works, well, works, it will be because this rich "buffet" will give you so much to think about that it will make you feel like some kind of aesthetic grinch to complain. What may be famine for one audience member will surely be a feast for someone else, and is only one course in a much larger meal. There's an admirable plea at work here to take a taste of something unfamiliar, to cleanse your palate, as it were, with a dish that you previously viewed as too foreign.

Richter has his own, admittedly better metaphor, seeing the various disciplines as disparate parts of one language. Keeping an untrained ear open to every artistic voice and hearing the similarities will, he hopes, be the natural response to the Consolidated environment.

"The different disciplines are not different languages," he explains. "They might be different dialects that your ear isn't accustomed to, but it's so easy to pick up on a dialect."

The successful fundraising campaign for Consolidated Works points to a local willingness to explore those dialects, something which Richter was quick to notice. The support for Artificial Life came before the board had even found the place to house it.

"People bought into an idea with no space and no art and nothing tangible to hang onto," he enthuses. "Something inspires me about this town that we were able to do that, to get people to buy into that."

Shiffler, too, is encouraged by the community support. A pre-opening bash in the barren building was attended by over 150 artists, actors, and others, and is indicative, she thinks, of future participation that will link all members of the city. Her confident optimism and genuine concern, like Richter's, can only be an asset to a project with the potential to change the way people view the arts scene in Seattle. The dream is a daringly large one, but the hope is fairly simple, according to Shiffler:

"I hope that people will come and be wowed by what they see and want to be a part of this."