Brown University
Lindemann Performing Arts Center
Location
Providence, Rhode Island
Owner
Brown Arts Initiative
Team
Acoustics and AV - Threshold
Architect - REX
Theatre - Theatre Projects
Size
94,500 square feet
Schedule
Opening October 2023
Awards
The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture & Design, The American Architecture Award, 2021; Architizer, A+ Awards, Finalist, 2019
Rehearsal rooms at the Lindemann create a space for arts education and training with professional acoustic quality.
Brown University aspires to be a worldwide destination for students who want to fully integrate performing, visual, and literary arts into a complete liberal arts education. To further this goal, the Brown Arts Initiative was established in 2015, and quickly identified the need for a theatre, an experimental media room, and a recital hall while also fulfilling its orchestra’s 250-year dream for a worthy venue. With only enough site for a single room, these four functions are combined into one building.
When the gantry walls are fully deployed the room becomes a black box suitable for various performance types. With adjustments the orchestra players and audience can be a part of the campus.
Orchestra Hall testing summer 2023.
The challenge of meeting these disparate needs is met by varying absorption and acoustics solutions while the intimacy of the room achieved by moving the walls. Side walls shift inward to narrow the room by nearly twenty feet for recitals; the room length can be halved for immersive media; and the ceiling can be deployed in a wide spectrum of heights and shapes. The sum total is a room always shaped to keep its audiences close to the action.
Audio/Video systems are as flexible as the room itself, allowing for amplification to professional touring standards overlaid with multi-channel ambisonics, motion capture, cinema, immersive video projection, and presentation systems.
Acting, dance, and orchestra rehearsal studios round out the program, each with flexible seating, a pipe grid, and AV systems to allow performances and lectures as well.
Listen to the Archinect Sessions podcast interview with the leadership team responsible for the project here.