Congratulations to Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) for the successful Grand Opening of the Dorothy Jemison Day Theater after more than eight years of fundraising and 17 months of construction.  Friday, April 13^th marked a star-studded unveiling of the multi-use 500-seat, $8.5 million state-of-the-art facility built for both school and community use.  Festivities kicked off with Opera Birmingham event featuring the powerful soprano Angela Brown.  The Birmingham News delivered a five star review of the  evening and praise for the new performance hall “Anticipation turned to a palpable buzz at the new facility, due as much to the hall’s sparkling acoustics as Brown’s ability to fill it with sound.”  The evening included performances of three talented ASFA students.

“Performance spaces that also serve as teaching labs are challenging from a design stand point,” explains David Kahn. “We endeavored to create a space that nurtures, showcases and inspires students to pursue their passion for performing arts.  I was amazed by talent of the student performers and am thrilled with what was achieved.”   Sunday, April 15 marked the official Grand Opening.  Birmingham Mayor, William Bell cut the ribbon to the main stage and marked the public unveiling of the most technically advanced venue of its kind in the Southeast.  Visitors received tours, commemorative tee shirts, cookies and lemonade.   Check out the official review of Angela Brown’s performance.

Photo Captions

Dan Gainey, Facilities Manager of the venue (left) enjoys the fanfare with Acoustic Dimensions President, David Kahn (second from left) E. Bryding Adams, Executive Director of the ASFA Foundation and Dr. W. Michael Meeks, Executive Director of ASFA (left to right).

Audience members start streaming in to the new theater in anticipation of the Angela Brown performance.

Students at Valley Christian Schools’ Conservatory of the Arts in San Jose, California are honing their musical skills in a high-tech rehearsal and performance facility unlike any other in the country.  Completed in late 2011, the new Conservatory building incorporates a multipurpose rehearsal hall that can be used as one large room or divided into two smaller spaces. 

VCHS desired acoustics with exceptional variability as it was highly important that the room be able to accommodate anything from a small string ensemble to a full marching band, either for rehearsals or for performances with temporary seating.  AD presented options for both physical and electronic solutions. In the end the school chose a permanently installed electro-acoustic system allowing any of the three space configurations to be instantly optimized for music style and ensemble size.

Read more at http://www.prosoundnetwork.com/thewire.aspx?entryid=180&add=view 

Auditoriums serve a multitude of communication styles and goals.  In our work we see 3 broad directions of communication that affect auditorium, design –  hence directing acoustics and technology design:

-          From the platform to the audience.

-          From the audience back to the platform.

-          From the audience to each other.

Auditorium designs typically favor support of one direction of communication over the others depending on the purpose of the room.

Presentational.  Auditoriums where the goal of use is primarily to communicate a message.   Excellent sightlines and audible connection to presentations from the stage  is the dominant priority.  Acoustics may or may not be highly controlled depending on the space use.  Technologies (AVL) commonly are a high priority in these spaces.  Audience leaving the space will invariably talk of effective communication within the space, but will seldom describe the experience as "enveloping".

Many conference center,  lecture halls, some worship centers and some theaters reflect this design priority by use of flat floors, mildly sloped seating or seating that simply allow sight lines to the stage.  

Responsive.  Auditoriums where the goal of use is high engagement with the audience – more than simple communication.  These spaces invariably wrap seating along side walls and start to wrap seating around the stage – with the goal of creating a high sense of connection for both communicator/performer and audience.  Technologies (AVL) occasionally become a slightly reduced priority as the space begins to increase in connection influence.  Acoustics and AVL become more complex due to architectural complexity. Audiences describe these spaces as "engaging".

Many theatres and worship centers use this design.

Community. Auditoriums where the goal is to create a very high sense of community within the space – where the audience participation and engagement is as high a value as the stage performance/communication.  These spaces wrap the audience around the stage (sometimes completely), occasionally bringing seating  onto the stage.  The focal point of the seating is not simply the stage, but also the other seating areas.   These spaces further demote the priority of technology in the program, however the complexity of the space design can significantly increase the difficulty of AVL and acoustics design. Audiences describe experiences in these spaces as "enveloping".   

This design approach is common in black box theaters, in experimental theatre, in a limited number of contemporary worship centers and  is prevalent in many traditional worship spaces.

March 4, 2012 saw the realization of a long-held dream for many members of Skyline Church in La Mesa, California. After a notoriously lengthy building process that originally began in 1981, the new 2000 seat Worship Center was officially opened and celebrated!  Through environmental, topographical and bureaucratic challenges, Skyline’s relocation had received the dubious title of America’s Most Difficult Church Relocation. Yet the amazing people of Skyline did not waver and their resiliency has been proven.

 Acoustic Dimensions has had the privilege of working with this church team through many phases including; the transition location at a middle school, the new Family Center which opened in 2000 and now the realization of the new Worship Center.

 

In 2009 as plans were being finalized for the new Worship Center, AD approached Executive Pastor Dan Grant with the idea of a Technical Systems Design Workshop.   Through this collaborative effort we would shorten the decision-making process and compress the design schedule into a more efficient time frame.  What resulted was a 3-day workshop that brought together the church staff, designers and contracting team to work through acoustics and technical systems design, engineering details, architectural  accommodation and coordination.  By the end of the workshop, all major decisions were made resulting in systems that not only met the design and ministry goals but also fit within Skyline’s budget.

 

Congratulations Skyline!

::Image by Claudia Uribe::

The New World Center is designed to technologically and architecturally support a new way of thinking about symphonic music. Visionary artistic director, Michael Tilson Thomas, conceived the idea of a laboratory for the way music is taught, performed and experienced. The New World Center embodies this vision, breaking boundaries and creating new levels of accessibility to symphonic music.  

Everything about the building bends the rules.  From the video art and live concerts projected in high definition onto the large exterior wall to the systems designed to support real-time collaborations between musicians in Miami Beach and anyplace else in the world, New World Center is the first concert hall to think as the digital world thinks—without regard to boundaries and geography.

New World Center utilizes Internet2—an advanced networking consortium led by the research and education community—to access a high-bandwidth, low-latency internet connection that is not possible over the current business-grade Internet.  This technology allows the New World Symphony to perform with orchestras in other cities, connect students with master-teachers and provide for interaction with composers in other countries.

Outside of the building is a new 2.5-acre public park designed by West 8. A half acre creates the SoundScape area--which allows outside visitors to experience live, free “wallcasts” of select events throughout the season.  

To read more on the technical aspects of the project, follow this link to our technical piece on the project.

While there are some exciting things on the horizon in terms of what technology makes possible, there are some cultural shifts that are driving the way technology will be used in the future.

Breaking boundaries to create envelopment.

While many arts groups, schools and churches currently use technology to highlight what is happening on the platform, there is a shift to using technology to create environments that envelop.  Surround sound, scenic projection, interactive devices and color change LED’s all break the boundary between what is happening on-stage to what is happening in the seating areas and in some cases break the boundaries of the walls of the facility itself.

 

Shift from program to user-defined experience.

The digital world offers the ability to customize.  Rather than linear experiences that have a predetermined beginning, middle and end, the digital world allows capacity to hack, customize and modify.  Users select hyperlinks to follow things that interest them creating a non-linear, highly customized experience. Look for this desire to create a user-defined experience to influence the way programs are structured and the technology that supports them.

Shift from presentational to participatory.

Presentational rooms focus on one direction of communication–from the platform out.  Participatory rooms support communication from all directions.  This may be through handheld devices, bi-directional digital communication beyond the walls of the room, or it may mean a completely decentralized room where the experience is created in a collaborative fashion.

 

 

 

In our industry, delivering great design solutions is the ticket for entry to join the ranks of the big firms. Anything less and you won’t be invited to work on the significant projects—at least not more than once anyway.

The differentiation comes in how those design solutions are delivered.

We live in a world where technology is fueling collaboration at higher speeds than ever before possible. Hierarchical structures (“command and control” as Thomas Friedman aptly put it) are giving way to “connect and collaborate” structures. The goal is no longer wrapping expertise in reports. No one has time to read them.  Instead solutions have to be developed in groups—the only way to get them to the point of action rather than having them languish on a shelf.

Many designers will tell you (off the record) that one of the biggest death-knolls for a project is circular decision making by the client. Design fees that should go to brighter and brighter innovation instead get wasted visiting and revisiting the same decisions over-and-over. And while in some industry circles you will hear people grousing about the clients, in actuality it is our—the designer’s—fault.  Current industry processes don’t allow for real-time design decisions, and engineers rarely develop the people skills needed to lead groups in identifying which decisions are important to make. 

In 2012, Acoustic Dimensions is investing heavily in structure to allow clients to make informed decisions rapidly.  Note that this isn’t about rushing or short cuts, but about re-engineering--cutting out wasteful and repetitive processes, tooling our offices for participatory design and increasing our team’s skill in group dynamics.  This efficiency is being passed onto our clients and is resulting in a work flow that is radically more effective and engaging.  As we mount our industry revolution, we want to invite feedback from the design teams and clients with whom we work.  What is the impact? How can we be better? We invite you to send your feedback to your project manager or to the leadership of any of our offices, because the best part of the revolution is that it creates a dialogue. 

Bramall Music Building houses a 450-seat auditorium, music studios and a domed rehearsal room to support the University of Birmingham's strong music program. The new building completes a crescent of buildings originally designed by Aston Webb over 100 years ago. 

Acoustically our challenge was to address the wide diversity of music education and performance in the Music School. And with a dome as part of the original design--this was no small problem.  Domes are notorious for their acoustical problems of focusing and whispering gallery effects.  We developed a dome diffuser which works on the same acoustic principal as balcony fronts in an opera house -- by scattering sound from the edges of a reflective panel.

Consider the typical horseshoe shape of an Italian opera house: if the balcony fronts were only reflective, there would be an uncomfortable focus of sound in the center of the main floor....but there isn't.  And the reason there isn't is that the sound waves are scattered by the edges of the balcony -- so to the listener the scattered sound appears to come from all along these curved edges and not from a mirror-image of the source.  Both in the opera house and in this dome, the scattering is not just a scattering in space: it is a spreading in time as the reflected and scattered energy travels to the listener from progressively more distant edges.  For this dome, our studies showed that the reflected and scattered sound would arrive at the listener over a period 30ms or more -- rather than all at once as would happen with an untreated dome.

In our design, we were not relying solely on edge-diffraction for the acoustical treatment.  In addition, the angle of the "petals" of the dome is selected to direct the sound to focus in the upper part of the room well above the occupied zone. Fifty-percent of the sound is directed to pass through through the gaps between petals to be absorbed behind the dome. This absorption of the sound helps control the loudness of the orchestra in this rehearsal room while the scattering helps the musicians hear one another.