The Perelman Center’s Acoustic Complexity

The Ronald O. Perelman Center for the Performing Arts is unique to its location. There was no performing arts venue in the financial district. It’s unique in its design as well: three adjacent theaters that may be combined and configured in 11 different ways, accommodating productions from opera to drama, rock to experimental media, all of this in a building that shares its foundations with train station and truck ramp immediately below.

Lots of theatres and concert halls near transit centers float on springs or rubber pads, but very few performance buildings have three venues directly adjacent to each other, capability to combine them, and intention to use them simultaneously when they are separate. Foot-thick rubber pads – hundreds of them – support the three venues, each with its own separate structural system, protecting opera in one from jazz right next door. No theatre touches the others – each floats freely from the others and from the trains below.

As intense as this was, figuring out the isolation suspension for the whole building was only half the battle. It should come as no surprise that a performance venue designed for multiple stage configuration also expected a variety of shows: traditional theatre, fashion shows, rock concerts, intimate jazz sessions, operatic arias, cabaret, and experimental anything. The acoustic character of a room, however, is not one-size-fits-all - one with lots of soft materials designed for electric guitars connected to towers of loudspeakers won’t suit an opera at all. Variability is important, but every performance benefits from spatial and acoustic intimacy and their combined on the bond between performer and audience. Distance is the enemy, so the small size of the venues (99, 199, and 499 seats) got us much of the way there. But the story of the theatres’ interior finishes is extraordinary.

One might assume more sound absorption is best, a “more is better” approach in an ambitious arts center where things will get raucous. But treating a performance hall like a recording room on steroids leaves it feeling “dead” to performers and unsettlingly quiet to audiences, with voices and music disappearing too quickly to savor. Instead, we opted for diffusion that immerses audiences in a wash of sound. Think of a mirror: producing a non-diffused, ‘specular’ reflection akin to looking at oneself in a mirror and seeing all the specific details of your face. A mosaic of mirror pieces breaks up the image and sends small parts of it in a thousand directions; all the light is still there, the color of one’s cheeks and eyes, they’re all there in the room but they no longer form a coherent image. Now frost the mosaic - fine scale diffusion. This takes whatever coherence was still identifiable in the mosaic and pulls it apart even further - the different scales of diffusion work together to form a wash of light, all of it still alive in the room.

This was our goal for Perelman: turn reflections from the boundaries of the room, which would otherwise cause havoc, into an immersive wash of sound - like that . Variable absorption controls the intensity of the immersion, but the immersion is always present.

Unfinished walnut was the chosen material. The shaping and spacing of the individual walnut planks came through an algorithm we created in MatLab – short for Matrix Laboratory, a numerical analysis program developed for scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. It’s not the first program one might associate with acousticians, but it allowed us to test and evaluate different shapes and arrangements. We used a genetic algorithm to narrow down the options, running through fifty-thousand options to marry acoustics with aesthetics. It would be impossible to physically test as many physical mock-ups as we modeled, but a full-size mock-up of the final product, evaluated by the client and design team with the help of actors and musicians, delivered the warm, uncolored diffuse reflections we had sought - it was a two-year process.

Mathematics is a means to an end, but Opening Night is judged by ear, and intimacy remains the core of all performance at the scale of these rooms. If we can strengthen the bond between performer and audience - and steep them in it - the emotional, psychological power of that bond becomes the core of the experience.