Just out of curiosity, was it $7m for the
auditorium and support spaces or including the adjoining field
house?
Saw the plans at the Mt.Zion schools website. Pretty impressive either way. Thanks for reposting the pics.
The budget for the
auditorium and
stage was $7m. We believe it actually bid at a little less, but since the design and construction is combined with the field
house, it is hard to say. In this case the contractor was even more reluctant than usual to offer an opinion. The fact that most school auditoriums and stages are a part of a larger project, it makes knowing what it actually cost difficult. Auditoriums and stages on a per square
foot basis must be more or much more expensive than classroom or office or even gymnasiums, but very hard to know exactly how much. I think this was a bargain on any basis, with a tall
stage with rigging traded off for seat count. Mt Zion is all about show choir and the competitions and festivals - and show choir does not seem very dependent on rigging.
PS - there is not much support space - much to my regret an I think others are seeing that quickly. I tried to preserve a space for a support building - a low roof addition upstage - but it will be tougher because of a large
transformer and some fire sprinkler piping. Grrrr.
I sometimes hear when we present a design and it's say $8.5m or whatever. I work on a lot of high schools where the
auditorium and
stage seem to be in the $7 to 10m
category, and in the 600 to 900 seat range - Mt Zion was an outlier in that regard), of other schools who did same for $3m. Inevitably not the same when I go look or find data - noisy rooms, squat shallow stages without
wing space, poor sightlines, no or sub-minimal access to lighting and rigging, emaciated lighting, rigging, and sound systems,
etc. I just tried to explain to a school and architect why I was not a good judge of "average" and "moderate" when it comes to this. I'd probably judge the average high school
theatre as inadequate in many if not every regard. It would be a great research project - a survey of a large number of high school auditoriums and stages -
Stage Spec sort of data - and some analysis. I still
play with trying to do that. I probably should pick a smaller state than Illinois - though I have thought of dividing Illinois at I-80 and just visit all public high schools north of I-80 (considering there are just under 1200 public high schools in Illinois, and probably 2/3 or 3/4 are north of I-80, that's maybe 850 at 2.5 per day on the average, so say 1 1/2 years and a lot of miles. And 2 1/2 per day may be optimistic if I included some very basic noise and acoustic measurements. Maybe try to collect some anecdotal data on injuries and such. Still, I'd like to know.
.
