David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York (inset). Photo by Michael Moran.
Set Pieces: Architecture for the Performing Arts in Fifteen Fragments
by Diamond Schmitt Architects
Published by Birkhäuser, Basel, 2024. Dimension: 8.7 x 1.1 x 11 inches. Soft cover or eBook. 287 pages.
Available through the Art Gallery of Ontario bookshop.
Before you were an architect, you were a listener. Were there any early experiences with sound that influenced what you do now as a designer of acoustic spaces?
DONALD SCHMITT Before I became an architect I was like many kids in their teens and 20s — an avid listener to a whole range of music of the 70s and the 80s. I went to Woodstock. We sought out The Band, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and would go to anything that was going on at Massey Hall in Toronto. But from my upbringing, I loved classical music and church music, hymns and Bach and Handel. But I wasn't conscious of how music worked with room acoustics, I was only engaging with it as an art and the pleasure of it.
WHITNEY SMITH Were you aware of how one concert hall or music space varied in quality of sound?
DON Living in Toronto and going to Massey Hall, which I loved and knew the acoustics were good there, but I didn't know why. Interestingly, people are shocked to know that Massey Hall has 2700 seats, so it's a very big hall with a form and configuration that is tight. That tightness of the seats produces a very intimate relationship between performer and audience, whereas in the disastrous, fan-shaped auditoriums of the 50s, 60s and 70s you were conscious that when you were seated under that enormous balcony the sound went into the back of the hall and died. We learned to never get seats back there, so we did understand halls in that sense. Growing up in Toronto at the time of Glenn Gould, who lived in the city, we learned from him about this idea of controlling sound. He was opinionated about recording studios and performing in halls, always wanting to control the sound through the recording process, which he preferred to his live performances where it was out of his control
As a performer, you want a connection with the audience, But the audience wants it as well.
WHITNEY As a musician, I have sometimes found myself in a room with particular proportions, maybe under a balcony or a dome, where I can’t hear what the musician five feet away is playing — as if the sound entered some kind of black hole.
DONALD Absolutely. It amazed me to discover recently that in the concert hall at the New York Philharmonic, the musicians couldn't hear each other on stage until our recent new hall. Imagine, from 1962 to 2022, they couldn't hear themselves and they couldn't hear each other. To your point about dead spots in a room, people who really know a hall will tell you to sit in these rows and not others.
WHITNEY As an architect learning about acoustics in spaces, was there a particular project or situation where you gained a sudden significant understanding?
DONALD Yes. After a slow trajectory of learning that took 25 years ago or so, we were working on the symphony hall in Detroit, which is a great room that had fallen into serious disrepair — pigeons in the ceiling, that kind of thing. After we restored it and brought it back to life, the DSO, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, moved back into it, and it took me a little while to figure out why this was such a great room. It was partly because everybody was so tightly packed in. These days we want to sit in seats that are 20 or 21 inches wide; in some American halls, they're even wider than that because of the American physique. But those seats in Detroit were built in 1905 and they’re 17 or 17.5 inches wide, and that’s tight! So the 2000 people in that room are physically very close, which creates a stunningly good acoustic experience. What did we learn? Well, with 2000 people and the total volume of the room, the total air volume, the music is energy moving through this space and bouncing off surfaces. The more varied and the more fragmented those movements, the better; the more rich the tonalities coming back to you. So putting 2000 people in a tight air volume is a good start for getting a great acoustic. Of course that is far from being the only issue is designing a great hall but that was a memorable characteristic of Symphony Hall in Detroit.
Variously configured acoustic wall panels in David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York (inset). Photo by Richard Barnes/JBSA.
Now, we don't want to sit in 17-inch seats these days, we want more comfort and knee room. For somebody like me, and I’m not particularly tall, my knees were just right for Detroit. It’s like a cheap airline seat where you're tight, a bit jammed into the seat in front of you. Of course there are other important issues. As a performer, you want a connection with the audience. But the audience wants it as well — to be close and joined to the performer. So another key challenge is to make rooms that deliver comfort but also support an immersive relationship between audience and performer.
Over the last decades there were halls built where it was as if the audience was looking at the performer through a kind of pane of glass; a kind of line, a proscenium where the audiences are on one side and the performers on the other. What we're developing and designing now are halls where the audience can envelop the orchestra, not only frontally but on the side and behind the orchestra in the choir loft — where you can sit in different places and have different perspectives, and therefore a more connected relationship with the performers. Again, elements that strengthen the immersive interaction between audience and performer and benefiting both sides of the equation.
WHITNEY You spoke of the music as energy moving around a room, bouncing here and there and landing at the listener. What do you have to consider about the surfaces that those sound waves come in contact with?
DONALD Before we started talking, I showed you full scale mock-ups for the walls in our Geffen Hall for the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. These are solid but deliberately designed, carved, wooden walls that allow the music to not be absorbed by the enclosure of the room but to bounce off them and back into the room. The wall panels have areas that are very smooth and areas which are highly articulated; all of it is in solid wood, very hard wood, to ensure that no energy is absorbed in the wall. It’s all pushed back into the room, you want to contain and maximize that energy.
"Pattern depth and articulation was concentrated in locations where auditorium walls jogged and changed direction. A continuous ripple envelopes the auditorium and is achieved through the careful design and arrangement of twelve repeating wall panel types." Set Pieces, p. 72.
These walls are configured to enhance the complexity of the bouncing sound waves in such a way that they mix to create a rich tonality. Other factors that go into it are the length of the reverberation times and the number and types of surfaces in the room.
WHITNEY You're controlling the acoustics through tools — in this case, wooden walls carved by hand exactly for the purpose of getting sound waves behave in a certain way.
DONALD Right. There’s a quote in the book that refers to Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memorium Benjamin Britten. I want to read it to you. It’s written by one of our team, Matthew Lella. “The Cantus 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, then swirls emerging from the rings. The wall at the Geffen have this quality — waves emerging from flat planes.” Matthew was inspired by the animations of Norman McLaren, produced by the National Film Board between 1933 and 1985. McLaren did a film called Lines: Vertical, and from this Matthew created sketches of what these walls would look like. So that’s the art of architecture intersecting with the physical requirements for music.
WHITNEY But Matthew is not an acoustician, he’s an architect coming up with these sketches.
DONALD Yes, he is not an acoustician, he's a mathematician and architect. The specific geometries that are being drawn and sent to the woodworker who carves the walls, yes, it’s an architect's hand creating those, but the geometries are specific.
Forty-seven 'Firefly' light fixtures hang from the geometric reflector ceiling, both specially designed for David Geffen Hall. Photo by Michael Moran.
WHITNEY And I presume the walls and their particular geometries are tailored to every new room you design?
DONALD Yes, each hall has a varied form depending on the place and requires different levels of sound reinforcement and mix. So, the surfaces — whether wood or made from some other material — are always freshly designed and custom-made for each project.
WHITNEY They’re bespoke.
DONALD That’s the word.
WHITNEY Going back to the flow of sound — sound waves moving from instruments or voices to the listeners in the room — what are you seeking to achieve with that movement and what are you seeking to avoid?
DONALD One thing we’re guarding against are focal points for sound waves. You want a complex pattern of sound wave movement instead of a focused pattern. For instance, Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto has too much volume and too much air, and this absorbs the energy of the music. Some of the energy of the music is moving air around and disappearing because the specific shape of the hall, which is circular, so the problem is that some of that music energy isn't getting to the ear. To some extent this has been corrected. I’m oversimplifying this dramatically, but the degree of complexity of reflection has to do with the richness of the sound, and the warmth and the engagement of the sound.
The Kirigami Ceiling (left and centre left): argon-cut and stretched stainless steel. Acoustic reflector surface (centre right), dimpled to hold sound efficient Firefly light fixtures. All three in the David Geffen Hall. In Memorial Hall in Marlborough, UK, two juxtaposed fixed and adjustable portions of ceiling reflectors (right) enhance artist and audience aural experience. Photos by Stephanie Huss, Dieter Janssen, Diamond Schmitt, Matthew Lella.
Though I’m describing some technicalities of acoustics, I am not an expert in it. We work with an acoustician and it’s a very collaborative process; of course the quality of the interaction is very important. The two of us are debating a number of questions: What's the degree of absorption in the seats? How will the back of the seats respond to the sound, are they hard? What's the level of detail or complexity? A great 19th century hall contains a lot of decorative detail, a lot of three-dimensional elaboration of the surfaces. This is good because its somewhat random complexity pushes sound all over the place. Very large smooth surfaces tend not to deliver optimal qualities. This is a good example of where architects learn from acousticians about how to build performing art spaces for good listening by listening to their advice.
How to vent the hall is also an important factor. As a starting point, you want the room to be as silent as possible. But 2000 people need a lot of ventilation — fresh air, cooling or heating — and the air must come in at a slow velocity so it doesn’t make noise. You also want the air to come in low, but also not be propelled by fans in the ceiling making noise to push the air down. This creates turbulence on people in their seats 40 feet below. Also, we would argue that when you hear music well, you hear better in a beautiful hall than a hall that's not beautiful. A psychoacoustic argument of this sort is a real issue: that we are more relaxed and more receptive in a space that we find beautiful. So the task of architects and acousticians collaborating for the best result is to balance the need for sonic comfort and visual comfort.
WHITNEY We've all been in restaurants where the level of noise is almost deafening, or at least uncomfortable. How do you deal with that kind of problem?
DONALD For me, there is nothing more frustrating than being in a restaurant where you can't talk to the group at the table. In certain halls, if the music is electronically amplified through speakers, or you are projecting a film or using microphones, you want to change the reverberation time. One of the ways to do that is to pull out sound-absorbing drapes to suck up some of that sound. I was at two events lately at Koerner Hall here in Toronto, which is a multi-purpose recital hall used for all sorts of events. One of the events was a memorial and one was a concert. Since Koerner Hall has exposed wood all around, for the memorial with speeches they pulled out the drapes on the upper level, and that changed the hall’s reverberation time.
Ceiling reflectors — "sound clouds" — redirect sonic frequencies above the stage at Memorial Hall. Photo by Jim Stephenson.
WHITNEY Though Koerner Hall is multi-use, isn't it limited multi-use — and, in that way, similar to Geffen Hall?
DONALD Yes, it is designed to be flexible. It’s a symphony hall, but it's not for opera and not for ballet. That said, you can do so-called “semi-staged” opera where the orchestra, singers and a reduced version of the sets are on stage. When the film West Side Story is screened and the orchestra plays the soundtrack live, people love that at the New York Philharmonic. But what we hear from the orchestra is unamplified, natural acoustic sound. Also, the stage is designed so it can be adjusted. Some of the seats can be retracted and the stage can be made bigger or smaller, and choir lofts can be pulled out or not. These are highly flexible configurations to support the configurations that an artist or conductor can use to present their show.
WHITNEY Can you have rock band in that room?
DONALD Yes, absolutely. They can screen films with electronic soundtracks or do product launches and a myriad of whiz-bang stuff because, again, the reverberation time in the room can be adjusted to suit the acoustical need.
WHITNEY So far what I’m learning about how sound behaves in a hall consists of three things. Tightness of space and air volume in the room. Flow of sound and how sound waves bounce off differently textured surfaces to create a richer harmonic tone. And finally, reverberation time that reduces a distracting echo or the unattractive bounciness in rooms. Have I missed something?
DONALD You’re a quick study, those are all important issues.
WHITNEY I am a fascinated student remembering a lot of good and not so bad live music. Having experienced music in halls all my life and never really understood the intricacies of acoustics — and, in another way, never having truly listened with an informed ear for how particular acoustics hurt or enrich the experience — I am now looking forward to my next concert in a good hall.
Mock-ups of Firefly fixtures are used to test the acoustical and illuminance properties of various materials, geometries and sizes. [Photo by Diamond Schmitt]
DONALD Let's go together.
WHITNEY I'll buy the popcorn. My next question is about types of rooms and how you regard one type of performance space from another.
DONALD At the most open level, there is an outdoor amphitheater where ensembles or the whole orchestra can play outdoors in good weather. This is in contrast to a place like Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, which is based on a classic shoebox model — a shoebox with a linear axis and a certain width. Over time we’ve learned to take that shoebox and make it more immersive and flexible, modifying the traditional relationships and creating a greater intimacy and intensity for the audience. Then there is the “vineyard hall,” a room where the orchestra is surrounded by what we refer to as “neighbourhoods” of musicians and neighbourhoods of audience members — all close, like the neighbour next door is close, to the musicians on the stage. Examples are the Philharmonie Berlin, where the Berlin Philharmonic plays, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank Gehry, these are vineyard halls. People will always debate which are the best rooms, but the vineyards are some of the great ones.
WHITNEY A final question. If you had a dream of what could happen with sonic public environments in the future, what would it be?
Philharmonie Berlin, designed in 1960, is an example of the vineyard hall style that incorporates 'neighbourhoods' of musicians and audience members. Photo from Picture Alliance.
DONALD I hope we don't lose the power of a person being in a room live with a musician playing. Increasingly we'll find ways to record and present performing arts in incredibly realistic ways, sure, but that immersive relationship of audience and a musical ensemble, that’s something I hope we never lose. The magic of performance is what really moves people. Not only in relationship with the artist, but in relationship to everyone else in the room — the relationship of being in a community. Listening to music together, whether it’s a large hall or it’s 40 people at the Monarch Tavern listening to a band where it’s thrilling to be engaged in the immediacy of what is happening onstage, thrilling to be engaged in the process of what the musicians are involved in with each other in front of your eyes. Rooms will be improved and made better all the time, but the visceral experience of being in the space with a musician in a community, that is the magic that you hope to create a room for. As architects, we make spaces, we make rooms, and in this case we’re doing rooms for musical performance, for ballet or opera. At the end of the day, you realize a great room can be a great instrument.
One of the great moments for me was when Dimitri Hvorostovsky and Anna Netrebko were doing a recital of a series of great arias of a number of Russian Operas at the Four Seasons, the opera and ballet hall we designed in Toronto. After the performance we got to meet the artists. They were both so generous and excited by the room. They said — and we weren't drawing this out of them — “This is a such a powerful space for performance. This is what we look for, great rooms like this.”
WHITNEY Rooms as instruments.
DONALD Yes. Great instruments they can sing with. And then they said, “We like it because it’s the pleasure of performance when the sound is great.” ≈c
Four Seasons Centre, Toronto. Photo by Tim Griffith.
DONALD SCHMITT has practiced architecture with A.J. Diamond since 1978 and is a Principal in the firm currently known as Diamond Schmitt Architects Incorporated. He is the Founding Chair of the Public Art Commission for the City of Toronto and served on the Design Review Panel of the National Capital Commission in Ottawa for over a decade. He lives in Toronto.
WHITNEY SMITH is the publisher and editor of the Journal of Wild Culture, founded in 1986. As a composer and guitarist, he leads the Whitney Smith Big Steam Band, a 17-piece jazz orchestra in residency monthly at the Monarch Tavern in Toronto.
All images courtesy of Diamond Schmitt Architects.
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