Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1978 - 11

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volume and maximum distance from the stage from a concert
hall to that of an opera house, and finally to a theatre for
spoken drama. The concert hall (Figures IV and V) accommodates the largest audience; the opera house, next in size,
is a reduction from the concert hall volume and seating capacity, achieved by closing off two balconies. (The drawings
also show a later, turn-of-the-century remodeling-a throwback-not Adler's-where the two levels of sidewall boxes
were joined by a double row of boxes across and over the
rear of the orchestra seating, and completing thereby, so far
as orchestra seating was concerned, a hosreshoe-shaped
auditorium of sorts.) The theatre for spoken drama, smallest
of the three, in addition to lowering the two movable ceilings,
achieved further reduction by a traveler curtain that cut off the
rear half of the grand tier. Each movable ceiling element is
hinged to the fixed ceiling structure so as to close off one or
both of two "flying" balconies, so-called because they were
brought forward over the grand tier instead of being attached
structurally to the rear wall. Adler's use of Russell's isocoustic
curve formula determined the vertical sightline section and
was in itself innovative for theatre design in the United States
at that time.
The contrast in size of auditoria between Chicago Auditorium-Theatre and Bayreuth Festspielhaus reflects the difference between traditionally subsidized European and improvised commercial American theatre economies that, to a
large extent, prevail to this day. Acoustics design for opera of
both the Bayreuth Festspielhaus and the Auditorium-Theatre
worked principally because of the meticulous care each designer exercised in determining the longitudinal section that
set the vertical sightlines. Good sight lines per se automatically yield good direct hearing lines.

Boston Symphony Hall
Sabine's introduction to the problem of room acoustics
was accidental when, as assistant professor of physics at
Harvard University in 1898, ·he was asked by President Eliot if
he could "do something" about an acoustically disasterous
lecture hall in the Fogg Museum on the Harvard campus, only
recently completed from designs by architect Richard Morris
Hunt. "Do something" he did, and in the process, by reasoning from the particular to the general, he hit upon his now
famous equation that precisely defines the reverberation time
of an enclosed space as being directly proportional to volume
and inversely proportional to absorption! His remedial work
in Hunt's lecture hall was so successful that within the year he
was engaged by the Boston Symphony Orchestra as the
world's first acoustical consultant for the design of the now
USITT/Summer, 1978

Figure VII
Boston Symphony Hall (1900)

internationally famous Boston Symphony Hall (Figures VI
and VII). As it turned out, this was fortunate for his client, as
well as for architect, James Follen McKim, whose pre-Sabine
design studies for the hall were, like Hunt's, based on a halfdome ceilinged, half-round auditorium that, had it been built,
could only have resulted in certain acoustical disaster. Sabine
began his commission by studying earlier successful, empirically designed concert halls in Europe, notably the Neues
Gewandhaus in Leipzig and the Musikvereinssaal in Vienna.
As with Adler, however, Sabine's client for reasons of the box
office specified an auditorium almost twice the seating capacity of any concert hall then in existence. Nevertheless, Sabine
got it exactly right because his powerful new mathematical
tool enabled him to calculate in advance of architectural design the precise reverberation time of the proposed new hall.
At the same time he restrained McKim from using auditorium
shapes he knew to be acoustically defective.

Contemporary Response
In the United States since World War II, except for throwbacks to the nineteenth-century, neo-baroque auditorium
(notably the Metropolitan Opera House and New York State
Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York, and the opera house
in the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.), the situation has
undergone drastic change, and American theatre design has
finally freed itself from the habitual dependency upon Western European cultural colonialism and paternalism. In fact,
there is even a reverse effect-Sir Tyrone Guthrie, not fi nding
conditions to his liking on the European side of the Atlantic,
came to the Western Hemisphere and founded two professional repertory theatre companies, both now housed in permanent thrust stage theatres where he, with designer Tania
Moiseiwitsch, exercised complete control over auditorium
seating geometry and stage design.
Western Europe is heir to a long tradition of patronage and
subsidy. This was extended not only to the performing arts,
but it also prOVided the capital investment necessary to design, build and maintain theatres, opera houses, and concert
halls. Except for the privately subsidized Metropolitan Opera
and the symphony orchestra organizations, the only institutions in the United States with a record of longevity for
support of the arts are those associated with higher education. (Using the same high professional standards of performance, length of season, and social origins as those currently
prevalent in Western Europe, there is, by comparison, only
one permanent rotating repertory theatre in the United
States-the Metropolitan Opera. There is no individual permanent repertory theatre company that in longevity can comTheatre Design & Technology

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1978
