A rehearsal room for a large music ensemble must strike a balance between acoustic support and loudness control. Typically Kirkegaard approaches this by capturing a large volume and treating it with a mix of reflective and absorptive surfaces, plus some movable absorption. The size of the room’s volume, the treatment of the reflective and absorptive surfaces, and the location and extent of the adjustable absorption responds to the types of ensembles and music that the room serves. Three examples: At University of Virginia’s Hunter Smith Band Building, the main user was the 250-person marching band. This new construction used generous height and deep absorption to control loudness, despite extensive glazing. At University of Southern California’s Schoenfeld Symphonic Hall, a former soundstage was adapted into the primary rehearsal room for the Thornton School’s orchestra, wind ensemble, and percussion ensembles, with secondary use as a recording space. The renovation had to compensate for limited acoustic volume and directly adjacent mechanical room while transforming the room architecturally. At Oregon Bach Festival’s purpose-built Berwick Hall the focus was on early music—rehearsal, instruction, and performance. Our response was a moderate volume with little fixed absorption, creating an unusually reverberant rehearsal room with an extraordinarily beautiful sound.
The Holtschneider Performance Center in Chicago packs an enormous program onto a limited urban site. The largest of the four performance halls in this new home for DePaul University's School of Music is the 535-seat Concert Hall. In response to a limited footprint and a broad program of performance types, Kirkegaard devised a simple but innovative acoustical approach to the room. A single massive plaster cloud hovers in the center of the hall, supporting onstage communication and providing first reflections to the audience. The large gap between the cloud and the perimeter walls integrates the extensive volume above the ceiling with the main volume of the hall. Extensive banners above the cloud are intended to “turn off” the upper volume, effectively converting the hall from a concert hall to a recital hall. More conventional curtains and banners below the cloud allow further fine tuning of the room's acoustics. The Concert Hall is well isolated acoustically from the rest of the 3 storey music building and exterior city noise by 18” thick concrete walls, concrete roof, and a continuous structural acoustic isolation joint.
Missouri State University Ellis Hall is a 1957 modernist building originally designed for the music department. The building was mostly untouched over the years, despite poor sound isolation and unremarkable, undersized performance spaces. Kirkegaard worked closely with Patterhn Ives on a comprehensive renovation that included replacing the building mechanical systems and much of its exterior curtain wall. The interior is a virtual gut/rehabilitation, but wherever possible existing walls were incorporated into new sound-isolating assemblies to avoid unnecessary expense. The substantial scale of the project compared to the very limited budget required the design team to find carefully calibrated solutions for what to reuse and what to replace. One of the greatest challenges was to provide an acoustic superior recital hall, a goal that the School of Music emphasized as critical to the future of their program, from a renovation of the low-ceilinged existing recital hall. The solution was to demolish the hall's floor slab to capture the room volume from an under-used rehearsal room below, while preserving the upstage pipe organ and a handsome wood side wall. The result is a very successful new 240 seat recital hall in the shell of the old hall.
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