Bradley Symphony Center

Bradley Symphony Center

Photo Credit: Ducharme / Steven Bullock


Restoring the Warner Grand Theater entailed the refinement of original detailing and the installation of modern features.

The historic lobby and original ticket booth were restored to their pre-1950 condition. To make way for the new lobby and reception area, an adjacent two-story restaurant space dating from 1936 was demolished. While the restaurant building was originally a Moderne structure, past tenants including Burger King and Taco Bell have wiped away that original detailing.

The addition added contemporary amenities adjacent to the historic structure. The first floor largely facilitates circulation, while the second floor is used as a secondary event space by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. A circular skylight, placed above a centrally placed spiral staircase illuminates the space.

The project also called for an intense engineering procedure to move the theater’s rear terracotta wall approximately 30 feet east to increase the stage’s size. New acoustical features were added behind historic details to transform the site into a first-class concert hall.

  • Client: Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
  • Architect: Kahler Slater
  • Completion Year: 2020
  • Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
  • Capacity: 2,400 seats

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Baldwin School Simpson Center

Baldwin School Simpson Center

Photo Credit: Jeffrey Totaro


The arts have been integral to the Baldwin experience since the school’s founding. The caliber of Baldwin’s theatrical and musical productions are now matched by a first-class venue. The Grey Gym was carefully renovated, and along with adjacent areas now comprises The Simpson Center. Materials salvaged from the beloved Cornelia Otis Skinner Dramatic Workshop were incorporated into the design. The Simpson Center features a flexible stage area with new lighting and seating, dressing rooms, and a set construction workshop. The hybrid seating system allows for multiple configurations suited for an intimate piano recital, or a full scale theatrical performance for up to 225 spectators.  

In addition to the performance space, the Center includes a spacious art gallery and arts courtyard. These settings offer an opportunity for visual arts students to display their own work, or to experience work by established artists. The gallery and arts courtyard add another important dimension to the diversity and depth of Baldwin’s arts curriculum.

  • Client: Baldwin School

  • Architect: Voith & Mactavish Architects

  • Completion Year: 2017

  • Location: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

  • Capacity: 225 seats


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Stephen Gaynor School Performing Arts Center

Stephen Gaynor School
Performing Arts Center


The Stephen Gaynor School and Ballet Hispanico are existing, separate institutions that collaborated on the commission of a new 12-story, 50,000 sf building on West 90th Street in Manhattan. The intent of this project is to provide discrete and highly specific spaces for each owner within a shared envelope.

The Gaynor School is a private elementary and middle school for children with learning difficulties, and inhabits the first seven floors, including the gym/cellar. The Ballet expanded their existing facility from their building on 89th Street to include the top three floors above the Gaynor school.

The Gaynor School theater space seats 300, with state-of-the-art lighting and audiovisual systems. Retractable seating allows for more flexible use for other events, including a supplementary service to the gymnasium for soccer practice.

  • Client: Stephen Gaynor School

  • Architect: Rogers Partners

  • Completion Year: 2019

  • Location: New York, New York

  • Lighting: Jim Conti Lighting

  • Building Size: 50,000 s.f.

  • Capacity: 300 seats


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Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts | R. Fraser Elliott Hall

Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
R. Fraser Elliott Hall

Photo Credit: Tim Griffith


Within the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, Canada resides the 2,000 seat R. Elliot Fraser Hall, designed specifically for opera and ballet and is home to the Canadian Opera Company and National Ballet of Canada. The traditional, four-tiered European-style horseshoe-shaped auditorium was meticulously designed for optimal sightlines and acoustics. FDA planned and organized the seating configuration to maximize a sense of intimacy between audience members and performers, with every seat computer-tested for the best possible sightlines.

A large, flexible orchestra pit permits the presentation of the full range of the opera repertoire, from chamber pieces to full scale 19th and 20th century works. Full rear and side stages, generous dressing rooms, wardrobe and instrument storage were all designed to allow three full productions to play in repertory. The generous rehearsal space is flexible enough for functions and concerts, and serves as a warm up space for dancers and singers.

  • Client: Canadian Opera Company
    Architect: Diamond Schmitt Architects
  • Completion Year: 2006
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario
  • Acoustician: Sound Space Vision
  • Building Size: 260,000 s.f.
  • Capacity: 2,000 seats

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Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater

Arena Stage
at the Mead Center for American Theater

Photo Credit: Katherine Lynn & Press Photos courtesy of Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater


A seminal American regional theatre, Arena Stage outgrew its facility long ago but was not able to take on a major renovation as quickly as it desired. FDA worked directly for Arena for over ten years to plan and design an ambitious transformation of its facility in collaboration with architect Bing Thom. The resulting Mead Center for American Theater transforms a landmark theatre into a stunning new complex with not only a new theatre, but also workshops, storage areas, rehearsal, public, and classroom spaces incorporated seamlessly into the design.

The 816-seat arena-style Fichandler Stage is now a focused and intimate room, with seating reduced to 650. The 514-seat Kreeger Theater, a modified thrust stage, was updated. Artistic Director Molly Smith requested a 200-seat flexible space, now the Kogod Cradle, to provide an intimate setting to nurture the work of new playwrights. This space offers artists a versatile but technically sophisticated venue without the pressure and financial expectations of the larger theatres. After the first show opened in this new space, Peter Marks wrote in the Washington Post, “The 200-seat Cradle, with its basket-weave walls, luxurious leg room and excellent sight lines, is itself an instant star, a grand platform for the showcasing of a new play.”

  • Client: Arena Stage Theatre
  • Architect: Bing Thom Architects
  • Completion Year: 2010
  • Location: Washington, Dist of Columbia
  • Acoustician: TALASKE
  • Building Size: 192,000 s.f.

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MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, Marie-Josee and Henry Kravis Studio Gallery

MoMA – Museum of Modern Art
Marie-Josee and Henry Kravis Studio Gallery

Photo Credit: Rich Hackman | Fisher Dachs Associates


The Studio is a new space for live events dedicated to performance, music, sound, spoken word, and expanded approaches to the moving image. Situated at the heart of the Museum, within the collection gallery circuit on the fourth floor, the Studio is the world’s first dedicated space for performance, process, and time-based art to be centrally integrated within the galleries of a major museum. This new space is a fundamental element in MoMA’s efforts to enrich histories of modern and contemporary art, while at the same time offering a key platform to support artists in creating new ways of engaging with audiences and experimenting with new art forms.

Designed to create an open, accessible, and generous experience, the Studio includes a double-height glass wall with a view of 53rd Street, an overlook from the fifth-floor collection galleries, and an entrance on the fourth floor that can be exposed to the adjacent galleries or sealed to control light and sound. The space supports the technical needs of performance with state-of-the-art facilities and acoustics. The scale provides an intimate, focused experience with the work. With flexibility to accommodate multiple configurations, the Studio will be activated throughout the year by a range of performances, programs, and installations via commissions, festivals, residencies, rehearsals, and workshops.

  • Client: The Museum of Modern Art
  • Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
  • Completion Year: 2018
  • Location: New York, New York
  • Capacity: 100 seats

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC Studios

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
EMPAC Studios

Photo Credit: ESTO


The EMPAC artist-in-residence studios foster the technical and exploratory nature of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s research in sound and visualization. Similar in their experimental nature but overlapping only slightly in content, the two studios complement each other and encourage use from all of the Institute’s departments. Studio 1 is primarily a home for visualizations, multi-screen and immersive performances, and dance. Video can be projected on all walls of the studio, and atop its 40 foot high ceiling, a walkable lighting grid facilitates efficient lighting changes.

Where Studio 1 is ideally suited for dance and visual technology, Studio 2 shines as a fully equipped recording and musical performance venue. The acoustic wood panels on the walls complement the resilient wood floor paneling; as in Studio 1, FDA designed a lighting grid that spans the room and allows designers to walk over its entire surface to access the lights.

  • Client: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • Architect: Grimshaw Architects
  • Arch. of Record: Davis Brody Bond
  • Completion Year: 2008
  • Location: Troy, New York
  • Acoustician: Kirkegaard

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC Theatre

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
EMPAC Theater

Photo Credit: ESTO


Rensselaer is providing EMPAC with a unique building, offering facilities that can be found nowhere else under a single roof.

With a 40′ x 80′ stage and a 70′ fly tower complete with computer-controlled rigging, the theater is equipped to the highest standards available to professional theater companies and offers an extraordinary resource for Rensselaer’s experimental artists and student performers.

The theater can be used with or without its orchestra pit. Movable seating at the parterre level, along the sides, allows artists to configure the theater as a proscenium space or to extend the playing area along the sides of the audience. The framing of the side galleries accommodates the attachment of projection screens and loudspeakers, allowing the audience to be immersed in virtual environments. Finished with maple floors and high-quality plaster walls, the theater has a slightly less formal treatment than the concert hall, so that its architectural presence can recede when the stage lights come up.

  • Client: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • Architect: Grimshaw Architects
  • Arch. of Record: Davis Brody Bond
  • Completion Year: 2008
  • Location: Troy, New York
  • Acoustician: Kirkegaard
  • Capacity: 400 seats

Links


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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC Concert Hall

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
EMPAC Concert Hall

Photo Credit: ESTO


Designed to be a first-class venue for symphonic music, yet equally capable of accommodating jazz, amplified music, presentations, film and dance with electronically generated sound and video projection, the EMPAC concert hall is configured traditionally in a “shoe box” format: as a long, narrow room of wood and masonry construction. The floor and lower walls are all finished in maple, while the upper walls are clad in a combination of precast acoustic panels made of gypsum and precast stone.

The ceiling, which is the most innovative feature of the concert hall, is made of panels of fabric less than one millimeter thick, supported on a delicate web of stainless steel cables. The fabric was specially selected and woven for EMPAC and is optimized for gentle reflectivity to high-frequency sound and increasing transparency to mid- and low-frequency sound, providing acoustic support to the musicians and audience while allowing the volume above the ceiling to generate reverberance. The ceiling panels form a convex shape overall and exhibit a gently glowing surface when illuminated.

  • Client: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • Architect: Grimshaw Architects
  • Arch. of Record: Davis Brody Bond
  • Completion Year: 2008
  • Location: Troy, New York
  • Acoustician: Kirkegaard
  • Capacity: 1200 seats

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC Experimental Media Performing Arts Center

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)

Photo Credit: ESTO

EMPAC is a unique building, offering facilities that can be found nowhere else under a single roof. The building contains a wide and very flexible group of major venues – a 1,200-seat concert hall, a 400-seat theater, a 3,500-square-foot studio, and a 2,500-square-foot studio – as well as suites for artists, rehearsal spaces, and support facilities. All are designed to the highest professional standards to accommodate both the traditional performing arts and contemporary works that incorporate digital and other media; and all are being made available to artists-in-residence who work experimentally.

FDA served as consultant to RPI and Grimshaw for theater design. “The thing that excited me most about EMPAC, was the focus on the artists,” said Joshua Dachs, FDA’s Principal. “The EMPAC concept of simply inviting artists to come and take advantage of the technologies available at Rensselaer, and giving them space to work, is very refreshing and forward thinking. For us, it has meant creating spaces that range from the informality of an artist’s studio to a full-blown concert hall. Each space provides a different kind of working environment and different technical and acoustical resources, so artists will be able to create work at any scale they wish. I know of no institution like it.”

  • Client: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • Architect: Grimshaw Architects
  • Arch. of Record: Davis Brody Bond
  • Completion Year: 2008
  • Location: Troy, New York
  • Acoustician: Kirkegaard
  • Building Size: 203,000 s.f

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