A sad state of theatre planning...

BillConnerFASTC

Well-Known Member
I've been working on a project and have not understood the source of so many bad theatre planning and design ideas from the architect and engineers. Then started touring some schools with a reputation for "good" auditorium and stages. Oh my. Explains why the mechanical engineer didn't understand my concerns as the comparable schools all have what I would call a dull roar background noise. You couple that with very dead acoustics - Rt's in the 1 second range where as most projects I work on strive for 1.5 to 1.8 - and its tough to make the case for good design. Orchestra pits that seem a mile deep with 4' high conductor platforms. I could list so many more common shortcomings. Its not budget, its not understanding the basics and priorities. (For some idea, see my article here: https://www.controlbooth.com/resour...lanning-and-designing-high-school-theatres.6/)

There are more auditoriums and stages designed and built for high schools in this country than any other market segment. Maybe more high school than all other segments of the performing arts market combined. And so many suffer from poor planning. We need to figure out how to change this.
 
Well it does seem you are on the forefront of all of this. What ever happen to that website project you wanted to launch last year(year before) that dealt with major planning/design/building? I feel like you should bring that back and make a go at it. God knows you got the knowledge and know how to pull it all off.
 
Are theaters included in RS Means data?

I've been sitting in on an "Introduction to Construction" class intended for fourth-year civil and architectural engineers and using RS Means data was something we did for a week or two. It's tables upon tables of averaged data, so that if you got a job for a medical office building, you can decide what materials you're going to use, and then go to the proper table and look up how much it'll (on average) cost per square foot. You have to adjust for a whole bunch of things after that, but the tables give you a starting point.

If a CivEng doesn't have that data, they will probably pick what they think is the next nearest type of building and may or may not be wildly off. I'll ask that professor when I see him this week, but that might be the start of where things are going wrong.
 
Means has some data - assembly, auditorium, maybe stage - IIRC - but I have always found it meaningless. It takes into account all those awful buildings that don't work very well and set a very low bar - and includes them.

A good high school auditorium and stage is frightfully expensive. I take spending millions of tax dollars very seriously in my work but doesn't bother me if someone says the auditorium cost $500 or 600 sq ft and the classrooms cost $250-300. They are the living room of schools, maybe more used by the community than any other space - obviously vying with the gym. But ultimately how do students learn about the performing arts in a crummy room where they can't see nor hear well? The communities would not tolerate similar indignities to athletic facilities, like cutting resilient floors, insufficient lighting, bleachers from which you cannot see, or baskets and goal posts too short.
 
Well it does seem you are on the forefront of all of this. What ever happen to that website project you wanted to launch last year(year before) that dealt with major planning/design/building? I feel like you should bring that back and make a go at it. God knows you got the knowledge and know how to pull it all off.
@BillConnerFASTC @Amiers Posting in support: There's certainly enough exposure and credible support available to @BillConnerFASTC here to offer comments and supporting voices / votes and a certain amount of "peer review" to keep things honest and upfront.
Thoughts? Comments? I suspect if you posted for support, folks would pile on in your favor. [And proof-read for free besides.]
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
 
My town just built a new high school including a performing arts center. I went to the planning meetings and begged them to at least talk to a consultant like they were doing for the Feild House. Their response is that "a theatre is easy to build, no moving parts or complex planning, while an athletics center has so much that makes it up" They got a great gym, the theatre is outfitted with Chauvet DJ lights a fly system the comes down in the middle of the wing Making the wing utterly useless and a speaker setup that causes feedback no matter where you are on stage or in the house
 
My town just built a new high school including a performing arts center. I went to the planning meetings and begged them to at least talk to a consultant like they were doing for the Field House. Their response is that "a theatre is easy to build, no moving parts or complex planning, while an athletics center has so much that makes it up" They got a great gym, the theatre is outfitted with Chauvet DJ lights a fly system that comes down in the middle of the wing Making the wing utterly useless and a speaker setup that causes feedback no matter where you are on stage or in the house
@peacefulone61 Posting in support. All too many times I've heard general contractors bidding their first theatre saying things like "How hard can it be? It's just a building with a big empty room full of seats in the middle?" Interesting how few successful first bidders return to bid a second or third theatre. Almost as interesting as how many general contractors a successful A/V contractor of my acquaintance chooses NEVER to work with again.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
 
So how do we as advocates for the performing arts make planners understand they need expertise in planning buildings for the performing arts, like they did for athletics at peacefulone61's school?

It may go to school board elections and getting an advocate elected and hopefully an outspoken one.

I'm told Texas has a law that requires spending as much on arts as on athletics in public schools, and looking at some Texas schools it seems very possible. (The followspots bought for the theatre being in the football stadium for player entrances not withstanding.)
 
I have heard many times from our contractors “how complicated a Theater is”. Well, yup.

In the next few weeks we will find out how much they didn’t get correct.
 
So how do we as advocates for the performing arts make planners understand they need expertise in planning buildings for the performing arts, like they did for athletics at peacefulone61's school?

It may go to school board elections and getting an advocate elected and hopefully an outspoken one.

I'm told Texas has a law that requires spending as much on arts as on athletics in public schools, and looking at some Texas schools it seems very possible. (The followspots bought for the theatre being in the football stadium for player entrances not withstanding.)
Perhaps we can impose upon @Stevens R. Miller to engage equal quantities of his legal and theatrical neurons in support of your query?
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
 
Theatres are about the toughest building type there is. The long spans and tall spaces make it harder than spaces with more systems - like hospitals - but easy to slip in a fat wall wherever you need it for a system in a hospital. No so easy in a theatre where sightlines and acoustics come into play.

And as users we tend to take these parts of schools more personally, unlike an administrator or math teacher, who only wants a good blackboard or whatever today's equivalent is.

Churches are worse actually, elements like theatres but not only do users take it personally, some if the money is theirs.
 
Ok, please forgive my ignorance, but why is every educational theatre project so custom and unique? I guess I'm just surprised that some more standardized designs or at least design elements have not become the norm. From my perspective it seems like reinventing the wheel on every project. As I said, forgive my ignorance, but is there not at least some sort of "best practice guide" to building education theatre spaces?
 
Seating count needs vary. Size of school varies from for me fromm 100 to 5000 in 9 to 12. The relative strength and priority of the different programs affects the design. A school with a former phys ed teacher as superintendent versus a band director has a huge impact. What they have currently sways opinion and design. And budget maybe most of all.

I stick with same principles but have to adjust for every project, and they do become unique.
 
Ok, please forgive my ignorance, but why is every educational theatre project so custom and unique? I guess I'm just surprised that some more standardized designs or at least design elements have not become the norm. From my perspective it seems like reinventing the wheel on every project. As I said, forgive my ignorance, but is there not at least some sort of "best practice guide" to building education theatre spaces?

They did that in Spokane. My high school theater became the basis for two more designed by the same firm, then our sister school got renovated to be very similar to ours. Now they all have very similar drawbacks and frustrations. They likely would've been better of trying to come up with something that fit better in those particular buildings than sticking ours in that space. Especially since the rest of the building is are drastically different.
 
Architects do try to reuse, as do some of the larger school districts that build schools more regularly have a pretty good idea what they're looking for. Unfortunately, usually the design is reused verbatim and all of the earlier mistakes are repeated rather than corrected, or the design is pushed into a corner because of footprint, budget, or program constraints and they would've been better right-sizing a new design for that school. Part of the issue here is that the parties involved in building schools might build a larger theater only every few years and by the time they get onto the next one have forgotten some of their previous lessons. Internally, architects have been promoted or moved onto another firm.

I can't speak to how other regions have been affected, but down here in south FL, many of the more experienced architects and engineers retired, relocated, or changed careers after 2008 and most have not come back. Business is booming and skilled design and construction labor is hard to find. Every project is fast-tracked and construction costs are up to meet demand. Lot of the A/E teams are trending younger than they used to. Not only is some of the institutional wisdom gone about how to design certain rooms/projects -- it's also gone about to manage clients and stakeholders and budgets from feasibility study onto program and design development.

The most obvious indication of this is that projects are getting green lit based on 5- or 10-year old budgets that don't account for inflation and newer construction trends, and they are not being accurately cost estimated through the duration of the design process. Then suddenly it's all a big surprise at CD's that the project is 35% over budget and everyone needs to make deep cuts. This usually ends up putting a project in the position where the program and footprint are already locked and permitted, but where reducing square footage is the only way to get the project completed to a remotely similar caliber of finish. The theater ends up still being a 600-seat room because that's what was promised to the community and the school board, but all of the systems, finishes, treatments, and luxuries (storage...) are hamstrung.
 
Ok, please forgive my ignorance, but why is every educational theatre project so custom and unique?

Architects do try to reuse, as do some of the larger school districts that build schools more regularly have a pretty good idea what they're looking for. Unfortunately, usually the design is reused verbatim and all of the earlier mistakes are repeated rather than corrected, or the design is pushed into a corner because of footprint, budget, or program constraints and they would've been better right-sizing a new design for that school.

To speak to that point I can say our district did exactly that. In 1995 they elected to build three 700 seat performing arts centers, outfitted with the latest and greatest tech of the time. All three are virtually identical (ours is slightly different from our sister theatres in that our loading dock/workshop space is SR instead of SL like the original design due to the layout of our campus), and all three had those nagging design flaws (no ladders to storage lofts is one annoyance). One of our light bridges is in a weird spot, the booths were elevated to the catwalks and almost put behind glass (the panes are sitting in our storage room, as they were purchased but never installed at the insistence of our inaugural theatre manger).

The three of the 95 buildings rectified the audio booth issue by building our own in the house, but in the 2000's the county elected to create three more such buildings and reuse the same architectural design. They held meetings with one (maybe more) of the theatre managers and other stake holders where they analyzed the design and updated the things that made sense. All in all they got some pretty solid improvements to the structure. Not to mention things like DMX and Ethernet everywhere as opposed to the 95 buildings where we get three inputs to the rack and no network to speak of as it wasn't then considered as big of an issue.

I know of another popular design in Florida that is a 700-800 seat auditorium that has a really wide seating area, a single light bridge, these ridiculous loft spaces over SR and SL and incorporates motorized electrics and dead hung curtains. They seem to be designed more for music performances as opposed to multi-purpose and can be difficult to stage plays as the sightlines are super wide. Also, many of them have the booth behind glass with monitor speakers, no sliding windows. That alone blows my mind that people who build these things can't figure out something that seems so basic to mixing live audio. It's not like you can't go to any concert venue anywhere in the world and not see a mixing desk in the middle of the house. Maybe architects don't like Rock and/or Roll?

I'm wondering though, Bill, maybe it's a lack of communication between end users and designers? Every now and then reading posts on here about these types of topics I wonder how people like yourself and @MNicolai end up on the "other side" of the world in the consultant/design part of the industry, maybe more of us end users need to find inroads to design? I like that you seem to have somewhat of a compartmentalized approach to designing these buildings (e.g. X number of linesets equals $$, swapping a pit lift for removable covers = $$ in savings, etc.) and I think that appeals to the bean counters and puts the usability of a space into terms that justify the costs. If more of us were vocal about what specifically we need universally would that change things? How do we voice these needs?

I think there will always be a need to build a better mousetrap as it were (and perish the thought that all these buildings end up looking identical), but some things have got to be pretty universally accepted as necessities for performing spaces.
 
Goodness, is it time for Performance Spaces for Dummies?

EDIT: with lots of photos and example plans, but not tiny B&W photos, so maybe a CD with them. It might even be cheaper to include a small flash drive instead.
 
I'm not sure you can teach someone how to design a theatre, and expect them to understand all of the issues and the effects of even subtle changes. How do you get an architect to accept that curved rear walls are very expensive - first to build and then to solve the acoustical focusing? Build it straight and if you need to jog the rear wall, so be it, but not curved. Until you've done it 20 times, it's a hard fact. And why spend a lot of money on what peoples' backs are to? Any idea how hard it is to convince architects and engineers that bar grate is not only not ideal for catwalks, but just plain awful? I did a drawing showing arrangement for structural loading for rigging - basic beams 10' on center and pair for head blocks to one side. Their first design had some wacky a$$ 7' centers, not centered on building, and head block beams twice as deep. That takes a expert on site to "nip it in the bud" Barney Fife style, not a youtube or book. And Owners think and architect/engineer company administrators think that computers allow this to be down in much less time than it use to be, but three months instead of the year it use to be given is a disaster. There is simply an iterative process that requires many disciplines to review and comment. Structural long spans and tall walls, ducts snaking in that have to not make noise, sight lines, lighting that needs to illuminate performers from a fairly narrow angle (its very hard to get architects to acknowledge the importance of center line sections early.)

The youtube/book/lecture/cook book approach can only work as well as shake and bake chicken or just add water main dishes - which is not very well. (With apologies to college students who survive on kraft mac and cheese.)
 
Another example of why cook book approaches don't assure good work. Duct socks - the fabric tube with holes to let air out - seem like a good idea to some in these spaces - not to much noise (if working at planned capacity) and not too costly. BUT add up the square feet of the surface and its a huge amount of absorption added to the room, just exactly what should not be desirable. Rectangular duct - horrible tuned absorber, sucking base reverberation out of the room - and we like natural base reverberation in the room. What many mechanical engineers don't know about ducts and noise and acoustics is frightening.

Just to say, who knows what never thought of solution to any issue in any building system someone might propose and without a grounded understanding of the basics, what they might try.
 

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