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

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

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.

Project Details

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

Links

Canadian Opera Company | Official Website

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.”

Project Details

Client: Arena Stage Theatre
Architect: Bing Thom Architects
Completion Year: 2010
Location: Washington, Dist of Columbia
Acoustician: TALASKE
Building Size: 192,000 s.f.
Capacity:
The Fichandler Stage: 680 seats (10,000 s.f.)
The Kreeger Theater: 510 seats (4,400 s.f.)
The Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle: 202 seats (3,400 s.f.)

Links

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater | Official Website

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.

Project Details

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

Links

MoMA | Official Website

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.

Project Details

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

Links

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) | Official Website

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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.

Project Details

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

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) | Official Website

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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.

Project Details

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

Links

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) | Official Website

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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.”

Project Details

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

Links

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) | Official Website

Media

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Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Brilliance of the Seas : Pacifica Theater

Royal Caribbean International – Brilliance of the Seas, Pacifica Theater

Royal Caribbean International
Brilliance of the Seas, Pacifica Theater

The second of RCI’s six new Vantage-class cruise ships left the Meyer Werft shipyard in Papenburg, Germany, in July, 2002. This 900-seat theatre comes fully equipped with a full-height fly-loft and three orchestra lifts that create enormous flexibility backstage, and complement the luxurious interior accommodations designed by Wilson Butler Lodge, making this theatre both technically and esthetically sophisticated.

The main stage lounge is fitted out with a movable orchestra lift wagon that can transport the entire 14-piece RCCL Orchestra in and out of the pit as well as off-stage, almost instantly. FDA’s versatile stage lighting and rigging are the result of several years of collaboration between Royal Caribbean International (RCI) and our design partners.

Project Details

Client: Royal Caribbean International
Architect: Wilson Butler Architects
Completion Year: 2002
Location: Miami, Florida
Acoustician: Jaffe Holden
Capacity: 900 seats

Links

Royal Caribbean Official Website

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Royal Caribbean International – Voyager of the Seas, Studio B

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Royal Caribbean International – Voyager of the Seas, La Scala Theatre

Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Explorer of the Seas : The Palace Theater

Royal Caribbean International – Explorer of the Seas, The Palace Theater

Royal Caribbean International

Royal Caribbean International – Voyager of the Seas, Royal Promenade

Royal Caribbean International — Oasis of the Seas, Opal Theatre

Royal Caribbean International – Oasis of the Seas, Aqua Theater

Royal Caribbean International – Radiance of the Seas, Aurora Theater

Royal Caribbean International
Radiance of the Seas, Aurora Theater

The first of RCI’s six new Vantage-class cruise ships sailed from the shipyard in Papenburg, Germany, in March, 2001. All have performance spaces designed by FDA these 868-seat theatres are fully equipped with full-height fly-lofts and three orchestra lifts that create enormous flexibility backstage, and complement the luxurious interior accommodations designed by Wilson Butler Lodge, making this theatre both technically and esthetically sophisticated.

The main stage lounges are fitted out with movable orchestra lift wagons that can transport the entire 14-piece RCCL Orchestra in and out of the pit as well as off-stage, almost instantly. FDA’s versatile stage lighting and rigging systems are the result of several years of collaboration between Royal Caribbean International (RCI) and our design partners.

Project Details

Client: Royal Caribbean International
Architect: Wilson Butler Lodge
Completion Year: 2001
Location: Miami, Florida
Lighting: Fisher Marantz Stone
Acoustician: Jaffe Holden Acoustics
Capacity: 868 seats

Links

Royal Caribbean Official Website

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Royal Caribbean International – Radiance of the Seas, Aurora Theater

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Royal Caribbean International – Explorer of the Seas, The Palace Theater

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Royal Caribbean International – Voyager of the Seas, Royal Promenade

Royal Caribbean International — Oasis of the Seas, Opal Theatre

Royal Caribbean International – Oasis of the Seas, Aqua Theater

Royal Caribbean International – Voyager of the Seas, Studio B

Royal Caribbean International
Voyager of the Seas, Studio B

For the first time, Royal Caribbean International (RCI) turned to theatre planning and design consultants to assist in designing onboard theatres for its new fleet of “Voyager” class cruise ships. The Voyager Class of ships contain entertainment spaces unlike anything ever built onboard, including this versatile 900-seat theatre. Called Studio B, the space transforms into a television studio for game shows broadcast shipwide. In fact, any event on the ship can be uplinked anywhere in the world via satellite. In perhaps the most unusal configuration, telescopic seating and a sliding floor retract to reveal a 40′ x 60′ rink for ice shows and recreational skating. Fitted with an enormous array of equipment for sound, light, and video production, as well as full complement of stage rigging, Studio B can accommodate almost any type of performance. Studio B can be found on the following ships: