Firehouse

12

The 85 seat proscenium performance space doubles as an acoustically isolated soundstage with full technical infrastructure of isolation booths and control room. A particular design challenge lay in the dual purpose of the “live room” and its conflicting acoustical requirements: for recording, the space must be acoustically dead, while for performance, the room’s reverberant character is important. Using prototypes of material and assembly systems produced in our workshop, we developed a continuous plywood shell that transforms along its surface to create opposing acoustic conditions keyed to specific areas: at the back of the proscenium stage, the plywood shell splits and distorts to act as a diffuser; above the primary recording area at the center of the room, it undulates to refract high frequency sound. From the lobby, the plywood shell forms the exterior of the auditorium, providing a kind of internal “marquee” for the theater that wraps down to create the ceiling of the basement bar.