Set Pieces

The Space of Appearance

Foreword

by

Don Schmitt

Justin Davidson

David Geffen Hall, New York

Introduction by Matthew Lella

Kate Wagner

Daniels

National Arts Centre, Ottawa

Photo Essay

116—127

Spiral Lobby

La Chasse Galerie

La Maison Symphonique, Montreal

London Symphony Orchestra Competition

128—143

Fireflies and Reflectors

David Geffen Hall, New York

145—152

Robert Lepage

Interviewed by Matthew Lella

154—167

City Room

Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto

168—181

Sound Cloud

Memorial Hall, Marlborough, England

182—193

English and Western

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock, Texas

194—205

Chameleon Canvas

Meridian Arts Centre, Toronto

207—212 Mimi Lien

Interviewed by Brian Sholis

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

261—264

Performing Spaces

Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Line Drawings 280—281 Thresholds

Afterword by Gary McCluskie

248—259

Kirigami Ceiling

David Geffen Hall, New York

WHY DO CONCERT HALLS STILL MATTER?

Davidson

Justin

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.

Wiener Musikverein, Vienna, 1870

Photo: Brandstaettler Images

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

FIREFLIES AND REFLECTORS

David Geffen Hall, New York

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

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.

CITY ROOM

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.

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

SOUND CLOUD

Memorial Hall, Marlborough, England

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

The nonrepeating tiling pattern is achieved with only two unique shapes, each with a distinctive section profile.

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

REFLECTOR PANEL PLAN TYPE R2-A

REFLECTOR PANEL PLAN TYPE R2-B

REFLECTOR PANEL PLAN TYPE R1-A

REFLECTOR PANEL PLAN TYPE R1-B

VIEW: REFLECTOR PANEL TYPE R2-A & R2-B

3D VIEW: REFLECTOR PANEL TYPE R1-A & R1-B

3D

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

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

Mimi Lien

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.

Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Kate Wagner

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.

Donald Schmitt

Matthew Lella

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.

Gary McCluskie

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.

Justin Davidson

Robert Lepage