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.