
Anything worth something requires hard work and perseverance, it’s said, and the people behind Messiah College’s new Calvin and Janet High Center for Worship and Performing Arts in Grantham, Pa., wouldn’t argue. The facility celebrated its grand opening in the winter of 2013 after eight years of design and construction, the result of a vision that was conceptualized nearly 20 years ago. Boasting 92,000 square feet of new construction, the High Center connects to Messiah’s existing fine arts center, which benefited from a number of renovations during the process.
At the heart of the High Center is Parmer Hall, a 900-seat performing arts space that serves as the main auditorium. A 150-seat recital hall welcomes smaller performances, and a number of faculty spaces and practice rooms, each designed to accommodate different ensembles—instrumental, choral, or chamber music—are used for teaching and rehearsing. The remaining square footage is dedicated to classroom space, a keyboard lab, and storage. Messiah’s former recital hall, located in the old arts center, was transformed into a black box theatre. “We feel like we really balanced our goals, which was to make sure we had a facility that was conducive to worship, which is an important part of who we are, as well as meet our need for academic space for students,” explains Kathie Shafer, vice president of operations at Messiah. The college’s leadership also wanted to build a performance space, “because increasing our outreach with our community was one of our goals.”
Juggling objectives
Shafer’s primary challenge was twofold: she was working within a fixed—and strict—budget, but she required the acoustics, in the main hall especially, to be world class. “We did not jeopardize acoustics,” she emphasizes. “I can buy more furniture later if I’m tight on my budget, but I can’t fix acoustics.” From the outset, this established a continual push-pull, give-and-take dynamic between Shafer and acoustician Christopher Brooks, senior consultant at Acoustic Distinctions, an AV design firm headquartered in New York (Brooks is based in nearby Lancaster, Pa.), as well as the project leads at Greenfield Architects Ltd. and the firm’s sister operation, general contractor/construction manager High Construction Co., both based in Lancaster.
“We did not jeopardize acoustics. I can buy more furniture later if I’m tight on my budget, but I can’t fix acoustics.”
- KATHIE SHAFER, Vice President of Operations, Messiah College, Grantham, PA
“Recital and performance spaces are critical acoustically, and early in the process there is a really rigorous effort between us and the acousticians,” says Frank Fox, principal at Greenfield. Especially, he notes, when it comes to shaping the space. “Ultimately, a lot of other things can’t happen until that form is somewhat set, and that takes into consideration everything from the volume of the space, the width, the height, the length, whether or not the floor is raked, how high the stage is, the overhangs on the balconies.” And this is before getting into the materials that will be applied, their surfaces, and their density.But before the acousticians could worry about the building’s interior, they had to consider the High Center’s exterior elements—namely those over which they had no control, like the freight train that passes on a regular basis, just a few dozen feet from the facility. “You can literally throw a stone, without a lot of effort, from the hall to the train track,” Brooks jokes. “So it was very important that that train not be heard, particularly in the concert hall. We succeeded in that, but it made me nervous because we didn’t have an unlimited budget.”###1###Parmer Hall itself is configured in a classic rectangular shape reserved for many performance spaces of this kind. With a 65-foot ceiling, Brooks describes it as a high room with a modest footprint: “That’s how you design a great room for music,” he says. Shelving along the sidewalls, overhead reflectors, and hard wooden surfaces create, he explains, clarity within reverberance. “So you’ve got two things: you’ve got a very high space where you can develop sound, and you’ve got hard surfaces that are closer to people so that the sound that goes up from the performance comes back sooner to people’s ears.”While Brooks handled the train issue with double wall construction, he did not have the budgetary wiggle room to specify a double wall roof; the hall’s actual roof is eight-inch-thick concrete, which he calculated to be sufficient. He also worked closely with Barton Associates Inc., the York, Pa.-based mechanical engineer on the project, to ensure that the air handling system created minimal, if any, background noise (comfortably below the Hall’s RC-15 criterion).
Adjustable reverberation
Parmer Hall’s acoustical design features what Brooks calls “adjustable reverberation”: a curtain-and-banner system that enables its occupants to optimize the space according to performance type—acoustic music, unamplified speech, and amplified speech and/or music—and the size of the audience. He explains that acoustic music benefits from reverberance (a live space), which is facilitated by exposing hard surfaces by storing the curtains in pockets for this scenario. However, this isn’t the case for amplified music: “Basically when you’ve got a loudspeaker, you really don’t want anything coming back at you,” he says. The curtains serve to deaden the room in this case and, if the performer wishes to create reverberance, their audio engineer may do so electronically.Brooks argues that one shouldn’t exclude curtains from the acoustical design of a high-end performance hall, since events can differ greatly in their demands on the behavior of the space. “Since pretty much every space is a multipurpose space to one degree or another, the requirements for speech and for music are radically different with regards to reverberation in particular,” he says. “A chorus, or an orchestra, or a string quartet benefits from a lot of reverberation, but speech is muddled by reverberation. And loudspeakers don’t like reverberation—they want all of the sound to come out of the system, and that’s it.” He concedes that curtains don’t come cheap, especially if they are motorized, rather than manually operated, and for the building owner to get their money’s worth, they have to be put to good use. “They have to be installed properly, they have to work, and they can be a maintenance issue,” he adds. “I’ve been in spaces where the user adjusts them to the quarter inch and plays around with them and loves them, and I’ve been in spaces where they just leave them there. It’s really important to work with the client.”
Integration issues
Clair Brothers, an AVL integration firm and loudspeaker manufacturer based in Manheim, Pa., was charged with integrating the audio/video systems for Parmer Hall, the recital hall, the black box theatre, and the rehearsal spaces. A ProTools recording studio is integrated with all of these spaces, enabling professors and students to conduct live recordings from wherever they are. Parmer Hall and the black box theatre are outfitted with DigiDesign Venue Remote consoles, which have direct ProTools recording capabilities and can record up to 32 channels.Jack Covert, project manager at Clair Brothers, explains that while the DigiDesign consoles were a little more expensive than the college’s other options, they are manufactured by Avid, like the ProTools workstation. Adding these consoles lends consistency to the entire system. “It’s much better for the students who are learning how to operate and use this equipment when they’re moving from room to room,” he says. “They get so much more out of it from an educational perspective.”
The loudspeaker system in Parmer Hall is comprised of a pair of Clair i208 line arrays powered by Lab.gruppen amplifiers. Covert underlines that while Clair Brothers manufactures its own audio products, that doesn’t mean they always make their way into their projects—but this time, the i208 system was the best fit. “It has a smaller footprint, was more cost effective and the performance is exponentially better [than what was originally specified],” he explains. The hall also features loudspeakers by EAW and JBL.Covert notes that because of Parmer Hall’s open ceiling, there is no real fly space. This required some gymnastics to position the two video displays by Stewart Filmscreen. “There is so much HVAC, lighting and infrastructure in that ceiling that everything just barely fits,” he says. “We were able to come up with a design using an ETC hoist that pulls both of the screens in and out of the space between the acoustical clouds and everything else that’s above the stage.” Barco rear screen projectors are fitted in the upstage wall.
Creative concessions
Because the design team could not compromise on Parmer Hall’s acoustics, it was forced to make several concessions throughout the remainder of the facility. Matt Twomey, president and COO at High Construction, explains that the team shaved approximately 7,000 square feet off of the original design, eliminating a third floor. “We didn’t change the program, but we were trying to fit the right program into the least square footage, because of the budget constraints,” he says. The design of the metal paneling on the building’s exterior was also modified to respect budgetary restrictions. “Originally, we had a horizontal architectural panel to break down this large mass of a box,” Fox explains, “but a horizontal panel, from a construction perspective, and how it’s applied and assembled, is a lot more difficult horizontally than vertically.” And thus, more expensive. As a work-around, the design team applied the horizontal paneling only to the lower elements of the buildings—those that are most visible from the ground—with vertical paneling on the main hall.
Collaborative teamwork
While architects and acousticians receive starring roles in the design of a performance space, Twomey underlines the importance of a united team—everyone from the contractor, subcontractors, and all of the individual tradespeople involved—so that everyone is truly working toward a common goal. “This project, because of the required sound quality, needed the electrician and the plumber and the HVAC contractor to make sure their systems were isolated properly, and that had to go down to the individual electrician installing conduit and wire,” he says. Otherwise, sound could be transmitted between spaces through these pathways.Mike Pluta, project manager at High Construction, points out that achieving this unity was, in part, helped by the fact that the majority of those involved were local. “Everybody had a central interest in seeing the project succeed,” he says, noting that a number of team members had either attended the college, or had children that had gone there.
“It was a local group that really had an emotional investment in this. For as complex and detailed as this project was, there weren’t too many blow-ups. Everybody worked really well together to solve issues as they arose.”Earlier in her career, Shafer had been the college’s events coordinator, making her, now the vice president of operations, a prime candidate as liaison between her team and the architects, construction company, acousticians, and AV integrators they enlisted for the project. “It was something I had a passion for, and I could relate to how the spaces had to integrate with each other, and how people might enjoy it and use it,” she recounts. “It was a lot of fun to bring it all together.”