Grimshaw Architects

The new Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) is located on the edge of the Rensselaer campus overlooking the city of Troy.

EMPAC is a platform for performance and research incorporating four distinct and specialized venues under one roof: an acoustically optimized 1,200 seat Concert Hall, a 400 seat Theater, and two black box studios created for flexible use by artists and researchers. Also provided are artist-in-residence studios, audiovisual production and post production suites, audience amenities, and student and support facilities.

So that the traditional and the experimental may be seen as yoked together yet distinct, Grimshaw arranged the concert hall and atrium axially with the main entrance in a linear sequence on the north side of the building, while the studios and theater form an adjacent sequence on the south. A conceptual dialogue was then initiated between these two sequences by seeing the Concert Hall manifested as the physical presence of an object in space, while the Theater and studios represent the physical absence of discovered voids within a solid.

Because the main entrance is at hilltop level, close to the roof, while the volume of the Concert Hall is fitted into the slope below, a large “found space” opens up between the two. Upon entering the building, visitors find themselves at the top of the Atrium and main circulation area, looking down at the exterior of the concert hall: a curved hull wrapped in solid cedar planks. This use of the topography also creates vistas over Troy toward the Hudson River, as seen from the campus approach and from major visitor spaces within the building.

The entire north facade of the building is a glass curtain wall, providing transparency between the EMPAC interior and the city of Troy. The glass wall allows daylight to flood the atrium, augmented by a halo skylight around the top of the concert hall that washes the cedar hull with the changing light of the day. By night, the wood hull is lit up from within the building and creates an iconic external identity that can be seen from distance.
The curtain wall features mullions that carry heated water to insulate the space from the Northern New York winter.Designed to be a first-class venue for symphonic music, yet equally capable of accommodating jazz, amplified music, presentations, film, and dance with electronically generated sound and video projection, the Concert Hall is configured traditionally in a “shoe box” format: as a long, narrow room of wood and masonry construction. The floor and lower walls are all finished in maple, while the upper walls are clad in a combination of precast acoustic panels made of gypsum and precast stone. The room is slightly convex in form to maximize acoustic diffusion.The ceiling is made of panels of fabric less than one millimeter thick, supported on a delicate web of stainless steel cables. The fabric was specially selected and woven for EMPAC and is optimized for gentle reflectivity to high-frequency sound and increasing transparency to mid- and low-frequency sound, providing acoustic support to the musicians and audience while allowing the volume above the ceiling to generate reverberance. The ceiling panels form a convex shape overall and exhibit a gently glowing surface when illuminated.

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