We enlisted Arup engineers because of Snape Maltings concert barn in Suffolk, England, which they helped Benjamin Britten adapt for music, and because of Wigmore Hall in London, whose renovation they designed. Both are small halls with perfect acoustics. Arup had also designed the superior acoustics of Harpa in Iceland, the Oslo Opera House, the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Opera in London’s Covent Garden, and a great number of successful acoustic concert spaces over the British Empire during the last 50 years. In designing the Glyndebourne Opera House, they broke out of the mold of the enormous finance-driven hall into a more intimate and emotionally viable space. Arup in turn felt we were in the wave of the future, wanting to create a smaller, more intimate concert experience. After Hector Berlioz convinced the impresarios of his day that halls had to be large enough to accommodate the Romantic orchestra of 88 or more players, this became a standard size. Cities commissioned them as a matter of status. At that time, there was no other competition for public entertainment, so the halls were financially viable. Some of these oversized halls even had great acoustics (Boston’s Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Severance Hall, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Leipzig Gewandhaus among them), but most didn’t. The eventual failure of large halls to attract the very crowds they were designed for has led to a new direction, such as the smaller New World Symphony Hall in Miami Beach, Harris Hall in Aspen, the Vilar Performing Arts Center in Avon, Colorado, Le Poisson Rouge (the former Village Gate jazz club) in New York. These smaller venues have become the sustainable concert models of the future. Such venues are adaptable to theater, lectures, jazz, chamber music, and solo concerts. They are effective multi-purpose spaces and the more adaptable of the acoustical and engineering concerns, such as Arup, have taken notice. In fact, the Romantic symphony hall is a brief aberration in the history of performance spaces; the balance is now shifting back to the historic smaller model. As Alban Bassuet wrote us:

Sounds in the Snape Maltings space mix in the large high-gambrelled ceiling cavity and float down to the audience, creating a floating sound. Located in the British countryside and converted from a malt storage barn, the 800-seat performance space is informal, rustic, made from brick, wood and exposed timber frames. The campus is laid out like a barn compound with a number of different individual buildings naturally fitting together by the necessity of time, reminiscent of a small medieval village. Like most classical composers, Joseph Haydn composed most of his work for a small number of spaces. It was for the Esterhazy Music Room that he composed his chamber music repertoire. The room is still in use today, proving its quality over centuries. Alban wrote his monograph on its architecture and acoustics. Cathy and I were deeply attracted by its enveloping sound, and so the Esterhazy Music Room (the Fertöd Jewel Box) became the benchmark for the Olivier Music Barn’s design. The room is 35 feet wide and 55 feet long and fits between a cube and a double cube. It is the ceiling which gives a room its determining sound, however. For that, we looked to Arup’s design for Snape Maltings. The Snape ceiling is a unique shape, and gives the music room to breathe. Dimensions can’t quite describe it. From Esterhazy we took the concept of a deep recess for the window, which filters the outside world without letting the view visually overpower the room, inviting the imagination to wander, but not too far. This recess removes the window glass from the sonic profile of the room. Thus the shapes and dimensions of the performance space were derived from the physical properties of sound. The visual design was then adapted to the rigors of the acoustic shell. This is backwards from the usual design evolution of a concert hall. Most architects feel the visual elements should take priority, but we put the sound first. You can always decorate a building after the sound is in place. But you can’t compensate for acoustic mistakes in the architecture.