978-3-0356-2723-7_SetPieces

Contents
4

8—9
The Space of Appearance
Foreword by Don Schmitt
10—27
Backstage
Photo Essay
28—29
A Way In
Introduction by Matthew Lella
31—38
Why Do Concert Halls Still Matter?
Justin Davidson
60—75
Sine Wave
David Geffen Hall, New York
40—59
Timber Cascade
National Arts Centre, Ottawa
76—85
Room for Everyone
Daniels Spectrum, Toronto
87—90
Why Acoustics Matters
Kate Wagner
92—103
Tornado Staircase
Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock, Texas
5

116—127
Spiral Lobby
London Symphony Orchestra Competition
104—115
La Chasse Galerie
La Maison Symphonique, Montreal
154—167
City Room
Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto
194—205
Chameleon Canvas
Meridian Arts Centre, Toronto
145—152
Robert Lepage
Interviewed by Matthew Lella
128—143
Fireflies and Reflectors
David Geffen Hall, New York
168—181
Sound Cloud
Memorial Hall, Marlborough, England
182—193
English and Western
Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock, Texas
207—212
Mimi Lien
Interviewed by Brian Sholis
6

214—227
Midnight Sun
Mariinsky II Theatre, Saint Petersburg
228—237
Continuous Hall
Theater aan de Parade, Den Bosch, The Netherlands
238—247
Timber Shell
National Arts Centre, Ottawa
248—259
Kirigami Ceiling
David Geffen Hall, New York
261—264
Performing Spaces
Robert Gerard Pietrusko
267—279
Eleven Halls
Line Drawings
280—281
Thresholds
Afterword by Gary McCluskie
282
Contributors
283—285
Project Credits
7

10

11

20

21

22

23

WHY DO
CONCERT
HALLS
STILL
MATTER?
Justin Davidson

Wiener Musikverein, Vienna, 1870
Photo: Brandstaettler Images
dings, blurbs, and beeps from your sound world, or go more than a few hours
without hearing an engine, could become an all-consuming quest.
Such a catalog of noises doesn’t even include the kind so many of us
inject directly into our ear canals. Since the Walkman’s heyday in the 1980s, music
has dissolved from a collective medium into a scattering of private soundtracks.
Instead of giving form to shared rituals or gathering people in a community of
taste, each of us gets to choose what sounds accompany our passage through the
world, unheard by everybody else. This is a profound change in the way humans
manage one of the five senses.
In the world our bodies inhabit, hearing orients us, helping us to understand
distance and gauge direction. Think how surreal it would feel to walk into a
cozy, carpeted den and hear voices ringing as if in a vast stone cathedral. Or to stand
across a trafficked street from someone and be able to converse in a whisper. And
yet the ubiquity of headphones and earbuds has hijacked that fundamental aspect
of perception, scrambling our relationship to landscape and architecture. Jog along
a quiet park path and the sounds in your head may place you in a screaming arena.
When you walk across a vast parking lot, the playlist in your pocket offers you a
singer-songwriter’s intimate fireside murmurs. Get into a car, and the stereo lobs
you into the center of an opera house or a dance club. Physical space has become
completely disconnected from acoustic space.
In this new world of electronic signals piped directly into the brain, the
concert hall has become a sonic nature preserve, a haven of unamplified vibrations.
33

Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam
Benjamin Britten opens with
a bell; then the strings create
a series of waves, building,
drifting, falling, coming to rest.
I see these patterns in wood—
the alternating dark and light
of winter and summer growth,
the breaks and knots from
branching, the swirls emerging
from the rings. The walls at
Geffen have this quality—waves
emerging from flat planes.
Matthew Lella

71

FIREFLIES
AND
REFLECTORS
David Geffen Hall, New York

129

Acoustic reflectors being installed; the Kirigami
Ceiling is visible at the top of the image
134

Preliminary sketches reveal the Fireflies’ movement
and a construction drawing shows the arrangement
of reflector panels. We provided the fabricator with
digital files to produce the geometry of the reflector
panels and the surface deformations where the
Fireflies nest.
Next page: Machine milling of fiber-reinforced panel
135

141

CITY ROOM
Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto

155

The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts is the
first purpose-built hall for the Canadian Opera Company
and the National Ballet of Canada.
The City Room at the Four Seasons Centre is a
lobby, a performance space, and a vitrine that presents
the audience and performers to the city. This room, a
transparent volume extending out to meet the sidewalk,
is the culmination of a long trajectory of social spaces
of varying scale—often interior courtyards or gathering
spaces. Here the social space stretches beyond the
building’s interior and becomes the face of this ballet
and opera house.
The room functions as a glass veranda, an
informal threshold between the space of performance
and the city street. Opera and ballet are considered elite
art forms in Canada, which can cause them to seem
remote or exclusionary. To counter this perception, we
sought to make the experience of attending a performance
visible. The fact of seeing the audience, and
programming free concerts in publicly accessible areas,
helps to democratize these art forms.
Such a direct engagement with the street
necessitated as open and transparent a space as
possible. In collaboration with Gartner, the German
glass engineering firm, we developed a west-facing
three-story structural glass facade with insulated
glazing and integrated motorized shading to control
heat gain. Stairs and railings within the composition
are carefully detailed to recede or allow views through
the space. The room’s top tier is reached by a structural
glass stair, at the time among the longest-spanning
glass structures in North America.
The balconies, along with a stepped-seating
amphitheater for informal performance, are arrayed
directly along the transparent street face. Audience
members arriving for a performance or circulating and
socializing at intermission or after the show become a
moving tableau for passersby.
The City Room, a social and performance space,
extends the public realm directly into this performing
arts complex.
157

An early study of the circulation through
the City Room, exploring the potential for
integrating performance into the lobby

Next page: From street level the audience offers a kind of performance to the city.
161

SOUND
CLOUD
Memorial Hall, Marlborough, England

169

Memorial Hall at Marlborough College is an Odeonshaped
hall modeled on Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in
Venice. It was built to honor the war dead at this historic
English college. While open-air amphitheaters are
renowned for their sound, their transformation into
rooms with ceilings and curved back walls frequently
produces poor acoustics, with reflections that focus
sound to specific points. Overcoming the acoustic
issues of this shape requires nonrepeating surfaces to
diffuse the sound reflections throughout the room.
We changed several aspects of the room,
widening the proscenium and reconfiguring the seating
to improve sight lines and facilitate entry into the space.
Acoustic interventions, in a modern formal language, are
layered over those adjustments. New convex panels were
installed along the curved wall of the audience chamber
and new acoustic ceiling reflectors were hung above the
stage. The shapes and textures of these contemporary
additions diffuse sound energy and create an ideal room
for multilayered natural acoustic performances.
The reflector required an irregular surface, and
the final two-part design is based on British mathematician
and physicist Roger Penrose’s aperiodic tiling
patterns. These patterns allow two tile shapes to be
placed on a flat surface in a nonrepeating arrangement.
We transformed Penrose’s pattern by making the surface
into a three-dimensional form, introducing a softly curving
asymmetrical parabola that gives the tiles their profile.
A simple rotation of each tile provided an ever-changing
irregular arrangement of reflectors, thus avoiding focal
points of sound within the room.
The resulting ceiling reflector is an asymmetrical,
cloud-like semicircle floating over the stage, the
upper portion of which conceals the air supply to the
room and the lower portion of which can be raised or
lowered to tune the room’s sound with precision.
The acoustic ceiling reflector and convex panels
at the renovated Memorial Hall

171

Digital and printed model studies of the
suspension system for the panels and of
the fixed and adjustable arrays
172

The nonrepeating tiling pattern is achieved with
only two unique shapes, each with a distinctive
section profile.
270
220
220
170
1087
1265
1202
790
411
70
150
70
70
100
70
70
20
20
70 200
1655
1912
672
620
150
70
70
20
20
REFLECTOR PANEL SECTION
TYPE R2-A
REFLECTOR PANEL SECTION
TYPE R2-B
REFLECTOR PANEL SECTION
TYPE R1-A
REFLECTOR PANEL SECTION
TYPE R1-B
REFLECTOR PANEL ELEVATION
TYPE R2-A
REFLECTOR PANEL ELEVATION
TYPE R2-B
REFLECTOR PANEL ELEVATION
TYPE R1-A
REFLECTOR PANEL ELEVATION
TYPE R1-B
R2-A
1023
1005
R2-B
R1-A
665
R1-B
1005
672
665
1023
R2-B
R2-B
R1-A
R1-A
R1-B
R1-B
R2-A
R2-A
REFLECTOR PANEL PLAN
TYPE R2-A
REFLECTOR PANEL PLAN
TYPE R2-B
REFLECTOR PANEL PLAN
TYPE R1-A
REFLECTOR PANEL PLAN
TYPE R1-B
3D VIEW: REFLECTOR PANEL TYPE R2-A & R2-B
3D VIEW: REFLECTOR PANEL TYPE R1-A & R1-B
173

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock, Texas, 2022, pages 92–103, 182–193

Memorial Hall, Marlborough, England, 2018, pages 168–181
271

Contributors
Justin Davidson
Robert Lepage
Mimi Lien
Robert Gerard Pietrusko
Kate Wagner
Donald Schmitt
Matthew Lella
Gary McCluskie
has been New York magazine’s architecture and classical music critic since 2007 and was
the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2002. He is the author of Magnetic City: A
Walking Companion to New York.
is a Canadian playwright, stage director, film director, and actor who founded and runs Le
Diamant Theater in Québec City. Since the 1980s, his productions have been staged all
over the world. Lepage is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has won the Governor
General’s Performing Arts Award, the Europe Theatre Prize, and the Glenn Gould Prize.
is a designer of sets and environments for theater, dance, and opera. She is a 2015
MacArthur Fellow and her designs have appeared around the world at venues including
Lincoln Center Theater, Perm Opera and Ballet Theater (Russia), Intradans (The Netherlands),
and the National Theater of Taiwan. She won a 2017 Tony Award and a 2023 nomination for
set design. She is a company member of Pig Iron Theatre Company and cofounder of the
performance space JACK.
is a designer, composer, and scholar. His design work has been exhibited in more than
fifteen countries; his music has been released by experimental labels ROOM40 and LINE;
and his research has been supported by the 2021 Rome Prize for Landscape Architecture
and other awards. Pietrusko is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania
Weitzman School of Design.
is the architecture correspondent of The Nation and author of the satirical blog McMansion
Hell. Based in Chicago and Ljubljana, Slovenia, she writes about the built environment,
cycling, and other subjects for The Baffler, Curbed, The New Republic, and other publications.
is a founding principal of Diamond Schmitt Architects. His focus has been on the design
of the firm’s performing arts, academic, research, and institutional buildings as well as
on high-density residential communities. He is the Founding Chair of Toronto’s Public Art
Commission and member of Design Review Committees at the National Capital, Waterfront
Toronto, and the University of Toronto. He is a Member of the Order of Canada.
is a principal of Diamond Schmitt Architects. He studied both architecture and mathematics
at McGill University and received a a master's degree in mathematics from York University.
He led the design teams for La Maison Symphonique in Montreal and the Buddy Holly Hall of
Performing Arts and Sciences in Lubbock, Texas.
is a principal of Diamond Schmitt Architects, leading the firm’s New York studio. Gary has
led the design for a diverse range of cultural projects, including the Four Seasons Centre for
the Performing Arts in Toronto, the Mariinsky II Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Adisoke Library
and Archive in Ottawa, and David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City.
282