Ennead Architects, a New York firm that designed the Cantor Center for the Arts and the Neukom Building at the Law School, had a different challenge with the Bing Concert Hall. Lead architect Richard Olcott talked about their approach.
Bing already has a fledgling nickname—the Fez—which plays off its shape. How do you feel about that?
Perfectly fine. I have to say everyone at the University has been very willing to consider contemporary architecture. There are so many beautiful, important and historic buildings here and I don’t think anybody felt like we had to copy that.
What inspired the exterior?
It started from the inside out. The oval room inside the Fez was born out of repeated testing of different shapes of rooms to find the one that would generate the best acoustic footprint and feel the most intimate. We probably did 18 different versions before we settled on this one.
There was a desire on everyone’s part to bring the landscape into the building and make it feel like you were going to a clearing in the woods to hear a concert and not walking up to an urban building with hard edges. We tried hard to erode all the edges and make them more permeable.
How challenging is it to build a project with this kind of acoustic exactness?
It’s definitely rocket science by comparison with doing a classroom or office building. Every surface in the room has to be thought about and tested.
What was it like working with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota?
I like to say in my next life I want to be the acoustician; the acoustician rules. If the [auditorium] doesn’t sound good then nobody is coming. He’s particularly concerned with making the musicians feel good.
But it’s not just the science of making sound bounce around, it’s all of these other devices that we can use to make you feel like you’re going to enjoy the concert: whether your seat is more comfortable, your view is better or whether you feel like you’re with your 20 best friends instead of 5,000 people. [Toyota] calls it “psychoacoustics.”
How does the “vineyard” arrangement of the seating play into this?
“Vineyard” really refers to [how] the audience is broken up into terraced little boxes so there is not a big sea of seats. It makes you feel more intimate. You are not one of a thousand people sitting in some giant expanse. You are in a box with 20 or 30 people.
And you are also surrounding the stage.
People say, “Why would I want to sit behind the orchestra?” There are seats in there where you could be playing a cello and I could be an audience member and we are [a few feet from each other]. Or you can look straight into the eyes of the conductor as opposed to looking at his back the entire time.
The maximum distance any seat in that room is from the stage is 75 feet—that doesn’t happen when you’re in a shoebox hall.
The other great thing about a round room like this is the theater. You get to look across the room at other people, not just the musicians, but also other concertgoers, and that again provides a sense of immediacy and intimacy.
