ARCHITECTURE

Copyright Lighting&Sound

America July 2011

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Glass Under the

Canopy 58 • July 2011 • Lighting&Sound America

A classically conceived concert hall opens in Carmel, Indiana By Judith Rubin

Left photo: Courtesy of the Palladium

T

he Palladium is a 1,600-seat, 154,000-sq.-ft. neoclassic, balconied concert hall; it’s the new home of the Carmel Symphony Orchestra in Carmel, Indiana, an affluent Indianapolis suburb. As part of Carmel’s new, $126-million Center for the Performing Arts, the Palladium is one of two new structures on West City Center Drive that form the cornerstone for Carmel City Center, a $300million, pedestrian-oriented mixeduse redevelopment. The project was spearheaded by new urbanist Mayor James Brainard and represents a major milestone in his tireless campaign to shift Carmel’s profile from bedroom community to a dynamic city in its own right. In addition to the Palladium, which celebrated its grand opening on January 29, 2011, the Center features the Tarkington Theatre, a 500-seat proscenium space set to open in August, and the 200-seat Studio Theatre, which opened in March. The local community turned out in droves for the Palladium’s many preview events and opening gala, and is visibly on board with its new cultural asset housed in a building of Indiana limestone designed by David M. Schwarz Architects Inc. The building’s four-fronted symmetrical

The building’s four-fronted symmetrical design was inspired by Andrea Palladio’s Villa Capra, “La Rotonda,” built in 1566.

design, massed around the domed central space of the single-room concert hall, was inspired by Andrea Palladio’s Villa Capra, “La Rotonda,” built in 1566. Its exterior detailing was inspired by the Viennese Secessionists; the interiors were influenced by the neoclassical designs of the 18th-century Scottish architect Robert Adam. Interior designer Walter Knabe created custom wall designs. A raised colonnade portico on the south façade faces Carmel City center’s village green and creates a grand entrance at the top of the orchestra level. The east and west facades provide ground-level entry vestibules, allowing barrier-free access to the lower orchestra level on each side. The north side of The Palladium, where the natural grade is higher, offers a symmetrical façade for decorative purposes. The building’s exterior features more than 15,000 pieces of Indiana limestone, mined from quarries located two hours from Carmel. CSO Architects Inc. was the architect of record for the Palladium; Shiel Sexton Company Inc. was general contractor. Pedcor Design Group LLC designed the building across the street from the Palladium that houses the two theatres. The complex is owned by the City of

Carmel, which set up the Center for Performing Arts Foundation to act as project manager, fundraiser, and operator. The center’s executive director is Steven Libman, artistic director is Michael Feinstein, and director of production is Kyle Lemoi. Inside the Palladium, Artec Consultants Inc. provided a range of design and planning services to create a top-level acoustical environment for classical symphonic and chamber music, which also supports the highquality presentation of amplified music in other genres. Artec also provided a similar scope of consulting services for the Tarkington and the Studio. The inaugural season calendar features a liberal dose of jazz and pop, along with mainstream classical, as Feinstein makes the most of this platform to celebrate the Great American Songbook and reinforce its ties to the American Midwest. The Palladium is based on the traditional shoebox-shaped concert hall with high ceilings and massive, sound-reflecting walls. The room itself is symmetrical, from side to side and front to back, creating a central column that is topped with a cylindrical dome with an oculus in the middle. The two oval spaces that fuse into the central volume are also symmetrical from front to back with

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The finished canopy is made up of multiple trapezoidal pieces of glass in varying thicknesses.

identical outermost walls and ceilings surrounding the half dome. The Palladium is one of the few concert halls that play into Palladio’s multiple uses of symmetry.

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Designing the canopy The outstanding technical feature of the Palladium is its adjustable-height glass acoustic canopy, the result of an intense collaborative effort between Artec, David M. Schwarz Architects,

and rigging expert J. R. Clancy Inc., under contract to the City of Carmel and working with the architect to satisfy both the acoustical and aesthetic requirements of the hall. Damian Doria and Edward Arenius headed up the Artec team. Doria and Artec project manager Chris Darland explain that the “traditional” Artec acoustical canopy, being both solid and massive, would obstruct the ornate neoclassical domes that are key features of Schwarz’s auditorium design. “There was a lot of discussion, and, to their credit and some risk to themselves, the architect offered the idea of a glass canopy,” recalls Darland. “Damian indicated that it was workable if we could get the right thickness and weight of glass for sufficient sound reflection, and we started to wrap our heads around it.” The canopy proper was fabricated by Waltek & Company, of Cincinnati. The finished canopy is made up of multiple trapezoidal pieces of glass in varying thicknesses, tilted to catch and reflect the sound frequencies and mounted in four sections on a steel frame that is raised and lowered via Clancy’s custom, dead-haul drumand-winch system. The Clancy team designed and built massive hoists with capacities of 23,000lbs. Each of the four hoists has a motor brake, supplemented with a 30" diameter disk with dual airbrakes. Being transparent, the canopy supplies the desired visual lightness, while the actual combined weight of its reflective components totals some 90,000lbs. “The canopy—and the design restrictions it imposed—represented the biggest technical and design challenge we had to figure out with the architect,” says Darland. “It led to a very happy conclusion; everyone is satisfied, and the canopy isn’t—in terms of visual aesthetics—a hulking, massive presence. It’s very cool, and it has never been done before.” “It looks like a modern addition to a more traditional architecture,” affirms

Doria. “There have been other glass reflectors through the years, but this one is unique in size and scope.” As Artec canopies go, it is also unique in serving only the acoustic and visual functions—being made of glass, it couldn’t also provide lighting positions or rigging points. Instead, these functions are provided by motorized linesets and trusses around and between the canopy’s four sections (more details below).

Left photo: Courtesy of the Palladum; Right photo: BHedrich Blessing Photographers

Installing and rigging the canopy J.R. Clancy tested the canopy hoists and its rigging gear at its shop in Syracuse, match-marked all the parts with color coding for accurate reassembly, and then trucked it to Carmel, where it was installed in stages over a period of about six weeks. “The winch mechanisms live in a very small space, and we couldn’t fit everything in at once by any means,” noted Clancy project manager Bridget Cox, who spent a year and a half on location in Carmel. “It had to be packed in pieces no larger than 4' wide to fit through the available service door at the roof well. The pieces of equipment were then lifted to the roof well door with a 90ton crane.” One of Cox’s early tasks was to coordinate with Shiel Sexton and other trades that had preceded her onto the site, to initiate changes that would facilitate the installation—such as having the door opening increased to accommodate Clancy’s largest piece of gear. “When we first were awarded the contract, that part of the building was already close to being enclosed,” she notes. “We very quickly started to look at access: There was no simple option for bringing things in. In some cases, it was necessary to undo work that had already been done, because it was otherwise impossible to get equipment into some areas,” she adds. “It was mostly ductwork, sprin-

klers, and some electrical conduit. Once they started to meet with me and review our drawings, most of the other contractors on site were wonderful and agreeable to coordinate our needs.” After being loaded into a hallway at the lowest level of the three-level attic above the center dome, the gear had to be manually hoisted to the two higher levels. This lifting system was what allowed the hoists to be shoehorned into the concert hall space without compromising the architecture. “Everything came in at 6' 6" above stage level,” explains Cox. “From there, some went to 66' and the rest to 79' levels. We had just enough clearance to raise each piece individually with a hand chain hoist.” Clancy loaded a total of 15 hoists into the attic, including four canopy hoists. “The heaviest pieces were the gear boxes for the canopy hoists, at about 16' long and 3,000lbs apiece,” says Cox.

“Assembled, each canopy hoist weighs about 12,000lbs, including the drum, base plate, gear box, and motor.” Waltek, the fabricator, was directly involved when it came to installing the glass canopy itself. “We worked closely with them because our cables and our rigging attached directly,” says Cox. “We worked together on site to move and mount the glass and coordinate the install of the hoist pieces and the glass. Waltek brought all the pieces in and hung them on the frame. At that point, we were the only ones who could operate the machinery—no one else would be able to until later, when we had commissioned the system with Artec and trained the operator. It was timeintensive: Things had to be moved very slowly, at a rate of 3' per minute; to fly one canopy from low trim to high trim took 20 minutes. The glass pieces are very slanted, and the canopy had to be moved multiple

The hall’s interior was influenced by the neoclassical designs of the 18th-century Scottish architect Robert Adam.

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well for months.” J.R. Clancy’s Paul Zagajeski and Greg Dale led the team of engineers that plotted the travel for the spider web of cables through the attic, using AutoDesk InventorRevit 3D modeling software.

Integrating the other tech elements with the canopy

The Palladium is based on the traditional shoebox-shaped concert hall with high ceilings and massive, sound-reflecting walls.

times in order to mount certain panes at certain levels. Safety was a primary concern for the workers, who would be under the huge pieces of glass— and, eventually, the audience. Shiel Sexton was wonderful in that process, helping ensure that all went as it should.” “The hoists are traveling drum zero fleet hoists, with lift lines that come directly off the drums to enter a complex web of blocks,” says Cox. “The blocks divert the lift lines to the correct ceiling tubes through the dome. To ensure the safety of the audience, Artec specified a ten-toone design factor—so the lift lines can support ten times the weight required by the system. For additional safety, we added air caliper brakes or dual overspeed brakes on each hoist, and electronic load cells for each of the 81 lifting lines.” Technicians can raise and lower the canopies using Clancy’s SceneControl 500 automated control system, which provides top-of-the-line motion

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control and 3D visualization of the performance space. SceneControl’s industrial-grade controller, developed by Clancy, is based on the same processor used for elevators. There are about one hundred 4"diameter steel ceiling penetration tubes within the plaster domes, through which run the winch and hoist cables for the canopy. “There was no margin for error in the location of those tubes,” remarked Cox. “The cables are 5/8" in diameter, and, if placement was off in any direction, they would have rubbed against the tubes when the canopy flew. At the time we hung the equipment, the scaffold that had been up for plastering and painting had come down—there would have been no way to get back up there to redo anything inside the plaster. They had to be in the exact right spot, and, as it turned out, they were, thanks to close coordination and a good job by the contractor, WR Dunkin, who I bet didn’t sleep

The existence of the motorized glass canopies underscores that this is a purpose-built concert hall. “There’s not a big stage house for scenery,” explains Doria. “The overhead canopies would be forever in the way, and they are much too big to take down if you need the space to fly.” Lighting truss grids cross the dome and a lighting bridge extends between two columns in the hall. There are more rigging points where additional trusses can hang to accommodate such enhancements as projection screens or rock ‘n’ roll-style lighting. Additional lighting positions are found along the side of the auditorium above the box tiers. “If there were lighting fixtures embedded, Carmel would have to have a lift to get up to the canopy and out onto it, to physically focus the gimbeled lighting fixtures,” says Darland. “But the way it is set up, no one has to go onto the canopies. They can be lowered to about 6' above the floor for crews to clean the glass and inspect the connections.” The motorized trusses being independent of the canopy, they can also be lowered for access to the lighting fixtures. “This really was a labor-saving item,” commented Darland. Separating the acoustical canopy from other technical functions posed audio challenges, too. “A real breakthrough was realizing that the loudspeaker arrays don’t have to pass through the body of the canopy, which is a typical setup,” says Darland. “What is often seen is a series of built-in hatches that open and close to let the speakers through while the canopy moves up to the

highest position. We couldn’t do that for multiple reasons.” A demountable loudspeaker array was the solution. “It weighs one-and-a-half tons, sits in a huge, metal-framed cart and lives in the basement,” says Darland. “It comes up to stage level on the forestage lift. Then, the rigging pickup lines come down through holes in the canopy, and the stagehands manually connect the rigging lines, which lift it out of the storage cart into the play position.”

A concrete, steel-and-stone building mass is naturally conducive to both room acoustics and sound isolation, and Artec kept it that way, locating the mechanical infrastructure in the basement in a vibrationisolation, box-within-a-box construction that uses a series of 50durometer rubber pads spread out and sandwiched between two concrete floor slabs. Additionally, there are acoustical joints on the upper levels of the building, and the

“The canopy isn’t—in terms of visual aesthetics—a hulking, massive presence. It’s very cool and it has never been done before. —Chris Darland

”

J.R. Clancy was responsible for building the trusses to design specs provided by Artec and DMS—a matter of odd shapes and close tolerances in order to fit between the canopy segments. “One of the trusses, by design, clears a couple of pieces of glass by about 3",” says Bridget. “It called for pretty high capacity material—60lbs per foot, and we ended up using a large, rectangular steel tube, about 5" by 2"; that was not easy to bend and get into the small spaces.”

Photo: Courtesy of JR Clancy

Room acoustics and AV “The room acoustics are based on symphonic sound without amplification,” says Doria, “which calls for strength and a reverberation time between 1.7 seconds and 2.8 seconds while maintaining clarity. There are some adjustable elements, as it needs to work for soloists and small ensembles all the way up to a symphony with a choir, and, one day, a pipe organ as well.” (A façade in the hall is the placeholder for a future pipe organ.) The adjustments are primarily via manual and mechanized fabric curtains and provide capability to lower reverb time below 1.7 seconds for amplified events.

electrical equipment is housed in vaults away from the main footing of the structure. Auditorium access points all have sound locks as well as light locks. The loading dock, backstage freight elevator, and personnel elevator all have doubleshaft noise isolation. A Yamaha PM5D console is currently the front-of-house sound board, but will be reassigned to monitor mix duty in the near future, with a new DiGiCo SD8 board taking the helm. Smaller events can be served by a Yamaha LS9-32 auxiliary console. Digico boards were likewise specified for the Studio and the Tarkington. “Digico is very popular now on Broadway,” notes Doria, “and a lot of groups that tour through Carmel will be familiar with it.” Effects gear includes one TC Electronic 4000 reverb, one Lexicon PCM-92 effects unit, and one Eventide Eclipse digital multi-effects processor. The bulk of the loudspeaker system was provided by Meyer. The variation in an otherwise straightforward sound system design was the center cluster, according to Geoff Zink, Artec sound and communications consultant. Auditorium seating options include a removable tier

facing out from the back of the stage that can accommodate a chorus or patrons, and a platform extension lift at the front of the stage with a custom Gala Spiralift that can hold 90 removable seats, extend the stage, sit at slab level or form a pit. “To address each of these areas, the center cluster has includes a total of 13 Meyer MSL-4s, CQ-1s, CQ-2s, a UPQ-1P, and UPA fills,” explains Zink. “They are supported at the orchestra level by UPA effects speakers and d&b audiotechnik E3 front fills. The left and right arrays are made up of Meyer MICA elements, augmented by ground-stacked M’elodies and a couple of 600 HP subwoofers.” Underbalcony fill is provided by 50 QSC AD-CI52ST units, powered by four Lab.gruppen C10 4X amplifiers. The monitor system consists of four Meyer MJF-212A floor wedges and four Meyer UPM-1P compact speakers. The Meyer gear was chosen for its flat frequency response. “They are very accurate loudspeakers,” says Zink. “We wanted a system that can pass a vocal signal through and color it as little as possible.” As noted above, when not required, the speakers are demounted for storage. “Taking apart and storing the left and right arrays, which have six elements each, is relatively simple.” says Zink. “The center cluster is much more complicated—a 9' tall cluster with many trapezoidal boxes that have to stay in the same arrangement always.” Fixed in a custom frame and installed by the system installer, All Pro Sound, the cluster is lowered from playing height into its own special storage wagon, built by J.R. Clancy. Also in the hall are four Renkus-Heinz Iconyx columnar array loudspeakers for announcements during otherwise entirely acoustic performances. In addition to canopy rigging and controls JR Clancy provided stage and sound mix lifts, manufactured by Gala; seating wagons and choral

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position for events that need it. “It’s a small lift with two wagons on tracks, so it’s simple to switch between the seat wagon or the mix wagon, optimized so that when the mix wagon is up, sightlines are not disturbed. And two guys can change it over in 20 minutes.” Video equipment at this point consists mostly of simple program monitoring, for backstage communications, and lobby latecomer monitors with plans (and technical capacity) to install multiple robotic P/T/Z HD cameras in the future. There is a projection room up at the box tier level (no permanent projection system in house) with a false back wall to allow the booth to temporarily occupy some lobby space for events requiring large projectors.

Lighting, etc.

risers, manufactured by CK Wegner, a EEE tracking system at every level; and acoustical curtains fabricated by Syracuse Scenery, all of which played a major role in the adjustable room acoustics designed by Artec. Other sound gear, in the sound control room, includes a 48x16 channel Whirlwind E Snake for analog-to-digital transposition, a CobraNet network, Peavey Media Matrix NION and Symetrix system processors, d&b audiotechnik and Lab.gruppen amplifiers, Clear-Com

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intercoms in the communication system, a SymNet paging system, Pro Tools recording package, and a Digidesign C24 recording control circuit plus audio interface. Available mics include units from AKG, Crown, DPA, Earthworks, Neumann, Sennheiser, and Shure, with direct boxes from Countryman and ProCo At the parterre wall, back of the main seating level, is an area three rows deep and covering 29 seats, which can give way to the house mix lift, to provide a live mixing

Dr Joel Rubin designed the lighting infrastructure for Artec, specifying a theatrical lighting and dimming system of ETC equipment. Four hundred eighty ETC 2.4K double high-rise dimmers are located in the building’s attic—410 dedicated to production lighting and 64 for house lighting. The system includes an ETC Eos lighting control console. ETC Net3 drops are located at each circuit position in the lighting control booth, the projection control booth, and in the center of the house. House lighting is run either through an ETC Unison Paradigm control system located in the lighting control booth and backstage right, or through the Eos. The fixtures are white ETC Source Four 14° and 36° units and Source Four PARs, plus six Philips Vari-Lite VL3000Q and 40 VL110 automated units. There are three Robert Juliat Aramis 2.5K HMI followspots. Indianapolis Stage Lighting was ETC’s dealer for the project. Air circulation in the hall is by way of an energy-efficient forced-air system integrated into the seats. The

Courtesy of the Palladium

Sky Trackers were deployed for the building’s gala opening.

cool air or warm air is distributed from underneath the seats. “It’s not totally unheard of, but mostly done in Europe until recently,” comments Doria. “It’s a bit quieter. Carmel has a good climate for this type of system.” The seats were provided by Series Seating, of Miami, Florida. The Palladium has additional flex seating beyond that mentioned previously, to accommodate ADA, camera positions, and other needs. This includes numerous pairs of demountable seats on the main level and at the top and bottom of the rear balconies, and all loose chairs on the side balconies. “Staff can take out sections and create space at a moment’s notice,” notes Zink. The demountable seats sit on a flat plate and roll out on a furniture dolly. Going down the rows, every other end seat has a swing-away arm. “We worked to make the circulation from the lobbies into the hall as intuitive,

easy, and safe as possible. The Palladium has a lot of stairs, and also elevators and ADA lifts, intelligently placed and not hard to find.” As often happens, the general contractor on the project had never done a theatre or concert hall before. Cox reports that the firm came through with flying colors. “They held the weekly meetings, and did the overall master combined schedule for all the trades. Dave Burchard and Tony Eisenhut were the main people I worked with. I asked them toward the end if they’d consider doing another theatre and they said that they would. I think they really enjoyed the challenge. Carmel was one of the most intricate theatres I’ve worked on, insofar at the level of detail. Shiel Sexton did very well with it.” Part of the suite of services Artec provided was the initial economic feasibility and programming study, back in 1999. “We looked at other

arts centers, seeing where the gaps were, who the community players were,” explains Doria. “We mocked up a season calendar, considered who might perform, and how they would share spaces. We also took into account how the organization would grow and created a mock-up operating plan. Other factors: the potential cost of the building, assumptions about what the building might look like, and how it would be finished. Carmel is fortunate to have a high level of interest from its community. Thirty-four of the 35 opening events were open to the public—good opportunities for us to tune the hall and observe operations, and also good for staff training. At the same time, the public got to see what was going on, and that stimulated a lot of excitement and buy-in from the community—not just for a few elite, but for all to enjoy.

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