The George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Theatre has strong ties to Salt Lake City’s deep appreciation of the arts. The city has a thriving theatre and music culture that includes its own highly regarded symphony and symphony hall. What the city lacked was a 2,500-seat hall to draw in touring Broadway shows like Hamilton and special opera and ballet performances such as The Nutcracker.
In 1962, the Salt Lake Chamber introduced the Second Century Plan, identifying the city’s need for a large performing arts center. This need was confirmed by a study in 1990 and a second study in 2005. A large performance venue to complement existing arts facilities was listed as one of eight signature projects in 2007’s Downtown Rising plan. In 2008, a preferred construction site was identified by the mayor’s Theatre Action Group to help energize the new City Creek area, and the Salt Lake City Council approved $15 million for the project by 2011. In 2012, the design team was chosen, input was solicited from the public, and the design was approved in 2013. Nearly $119 million in funding came from Salt Lake County, the City of Salt Lake City, and private donations including the naming sponsor, George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles.
The design team consists of Pelli Clarke Pelli, HKS Architects, Fisher Dachs Associates, and Jaffe Holden. The Eccles Theatre opened in 2016 to host touring Broadway shows, concerts, and other entertainment events. Delta Performance Hall seats 2,468 people, and the Regent Street Theatre seats 150 to 250 people in an intimate, black box theatre. A six-story Grand Lobby connects to a multi-use development and holds public art and events on an outdoor plaza to contribute to the energy on Regent Street. The completed project has been enthusiastically received by the community and touring artists.
Challenge
Designing an ideal aural environment for this type of multi-use hall was a complex task. The acoustic needs for Broadway shows, concerts, and special events had to be met in addition to the more natural acoustic needs of ballet and opera. With a noisy, light rail transit system in front of the facility, robust sound isolation was required to ensure multiple facilities could be used simultaneously without sound bleed.
The footprint of the site was extremely tight, and there was almost no room for the very large mechanical units needed to serve the seating area and stage. In order for them to be placed on the roof, strict background noise levels and NC20 criteria would need to be met so noise from the fans wouldn’t be distracting to the audience.
We needed to dig deep into our vast experience with multi-use halls to solve these challenges.
Our task was to create a space with acoustic and visual intimacy, one where the audience could be located very close to the stage, and then to complement that with sound that is immediate and visceral but not overly loud or harsh. We wanted the hall to feel very live acoustically, tight and small, but at the same time allow sound from amplified speakers to breathe and expand naturally.
We needed to create an acoustic volume above the audience seating so that natural acoustics had the perfect resonance and richness for natural sound. At the same time, acoustic drapes and banners needed to be perfectly placed and of the correct material in order to appropriately dampen the liveness and room reverberant energy for amplified shows with only the push of a preset button.
In order to isolate the hall from the noisy city environment, we specified massive concrete walls (18'' thick in places) and eight inch thick concrete roofs. To isolate noise from the light rail system, we used a “mat slab” almost five feet thick beneath the hall.
Mechanical systems on the roof over the hall use special, quiet fan-arrays of multiple small fans, rather than one large fan. Duct runs were carefully routed, and all units were mounted on dozens of custom spring mounts in order to allow roof top units to be dead quiet in the hall.
Creating The Building
The site was very narrow and squeezed between an existing school building and a parking garage in addition to an adjacent new office tower. This was a big challenge for the design team, and a large number of meetings, presentations, and conference calls occurred to ensure all the program elements could fit and function at the highest level. Jaffe Holden’s acoustic criteria, design input, and recommendations were followed to the letter and holistically integrated in the design. AV and IT systems designed by Jaffe Holden provide a very high level of functionality on a tight budget.
Acoustic Design Concepts
Volume
Delta Hall’s programming includes live orchestras for ballet and opera and also loud amplified events. Volume was a necessity, and given the limited footprint, this meant we needed to go vertical in order to create the 750,000 cubic feet to achieve the required acoustic volume. The hall is almost as tall as the stage house.
Shaping And Diffusion
Drywalls were shaped using multiple broad, convex curves to both reduce room modes and flutter echoes, and to reinforce intimacy between the audience and performers. Our goal was to intensify the experience and transport the audience.
Acoustic diffusion that resembles stone blocks was added to the walls, which are made of thick MDF panels with the sides facing the stage in order to break up sound waves. The width of the hall is narrower, about 60', in the front of the hall. This provides frontal and lateral reflections that arrive within 80 milliseconds of the direct sound.
Balconies And Boxes
In order to meet the very ambitious 2,500-seat capacity, the design team created two wide, but shallow, balconies and a large, wide orchestra seating area to get the audience as close as possible to the stage. By limiting the wide portion of the hall to the rear seating area, we were able to use the surfaces close to the stage to promote clarity and spacious reflections without sacrificing capacity, thus breathing energy into the building.
We limited the number of rows under the balconies and opened the aperture at the front to the balcony to almost 14' to let sound circulate freely. The ceiling over the balcony as well as the rear wall behind the balcony seats was shaped, angled, and constructed to complement the immediacy and intimacy of the sound. This also tempered the low frequency (bass) that can otherwise build-up when contained under balcony spaces.
The side boxes are more like side galleries because they sweep along the curved side walls in a gentle arc. Sound reflections from the underside of these side seating zones are directed back down towards the orchestra seating to provide additional intelligibility and clearness of sound. The faces of the side boxes are designed for diffusion, while the balcony faces facing the stage are perforated metal over sound-absorbing fabric. Changing the acoustic properties of each of the balcony and box fronts enabled us to produce diffuse reflections from the loudspeaker arrays back to the performers to promote onstage hearing and intimacy.
Orchestra Pit
The quality and character of sound emanating from, and returning to, the pit musicians was not neglected. While the pit has a number of innovative acoustic features, the primary acoustic devices are large wood acoustic reflectors, 30' above the pit. Musicians need to sense the hall and their impact on it, and the reflector gives that quality to the sound in addition to so much more. Openings in the pit reflector are engineered to allow specific frequencies and proportions of pit sound to escape into the attic. There it undergoes a transition from direct sound to reverberant energy. This sense of room ambience is especially critical for ballet and opera orchestras.
Ceiling
Pelli Clarke Pelli wanted the atmosphere of an evening sky represented in the attic space when visible from the audience chamber. We designed a spacious and substantial impression of sound unhindered by a solid ceiling. The starfield design is a matrix of hundreds of low voltage lights that can dim and twinkle while providing the acoustic openness we desired. We recommended noiseless toroidal low-voltage transformers instead of humming standard transformers. We actually helped develop these transformers for the lighting market a few years ago. They are inaudible and thus can be located in catwalks of an acoustically open ceiling.
HVAC Noise
Immense HVAC units the size of tractor trailers are mounted on the roof. We needed the audience’s impressions of the show to be unhindered by air noise. In order to accomplish this, we direct air down from the roof in huge duct shafts at the rear of the hall and into a plenum below each seating area. Then, the audience air is delivered noiselessly to patrons via hundreds of flush floor air diffusers located under the seats.
Mix Position
A clever design of the sound control room wall consists of sliding glass doors at the rear of the orchestra. This allows the large sound board and ancillary racks to be rolled out to a mix position “porch” that can accommodate Broadway-level show engineers. When it’s not needed, the show sound board can easily roll back into the booth for secure lock-up. When the sound design does not warrant the in-house mix, operators can run the show from inside the acoustically designed booth.
Banners And Drapes
While the visual sense of the room ends at the starfield lighting, the actual roof is located dozens of feet above it. In the space between is an acoustically tunable volume that can change the aura of the hall by using an array of acoustic drapes and banners.
Nine motorized 25oz-per-square-yard, 100% fully motor-controlled drapes cross the hall from left to right, and two large drapes can be deployed on upper side walls to vary reverberation time from a high of 1.6 seconds (occupied) to 1.25 seconds. The total coverage area is 6,700 square feet.
Five acoustic banners placed along the proscenium wall are 29' tall and can be controlled with the press of a button. The mix of drapes and banners is deliberate; tracking drapes across the hall are effective at controlling sound energy in the mid and high frequencies, while double-layer wool serge banners are especially efficient at absorbing bass frequencies. For a sensation of controlled bass response, we specified the banners be hung 14'' off the proscenium wall and the fabric layers be spread six inches apart.
Check out the gallery for architectural layouts.
Mark Holden is chairman and lead acoustic designer at Jaffe Holden. He has collaborated on hundreds of diverse performance and exhibition space designs throughout the world. Holden thrives on the creative design processes that call on his unique skills as an engineer, physicist, communicator, and jazz musician to create superior acoustic environments. In January of 2016, he released Acoustics of Multi-Use Performing Arts Centers, a guide to achieving outstanding acoustics in flexible spaces, published by Taylor & Francis Group. www.jaffeholden.com