The famed exterior of Carnegie Hall

New York City’s Carnegie Hall has embarked on a literally ground- breaking project to build a new underground performance space.

According to Carnegie Hall’s mission statement, the new venue will be a “state-of-the-art facility envisioned not only as a third performance venue, but also as an educational center and musical laboratory. [It will be] a multipurpose center for the exchange of musical ideas in the 21st century.”

Named the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall, in honor of the Carnegie Hall trustees who recently made a $10 million gift, it will enclose a new, variable performance space, dubbed the Judith Arron Auditorium after Carnegie Hall’s former executive and artistic director, who passed away in December 1998 and was instrumental in bringing this hall to life.

When completed in the spring of 2002, the intermediate-sized Zankel Hall, combined with the 268-seat Weill Recital Hall and the 2,804-seat Stern Auditorium, will return Carnegie Hall to its original, full complement of three performance venues.

Festivals planned around a particular composer or theme will be able simultaneously to use each different-sized theater to feature the appropriate performance, increasing Carnegie Hall’s programming options.

Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, the current executive and artistic director at Carnegie Hall, says the new facility will be “perfect for smaller ensembles, chamber orchestras, experimental music, contemporary music, jazz and especially for educational work.”

There has always been an underground performance space at Carnegie Hall. In 1891, it was the site of the first recital at the facility, one month before Tchaikovsky inaugurated the main hall upstairs. Since then, the below grade space has gone through five incarnations. First, it had a five-year run as a concert hall. Then, in 1896, it became the Lyceum, home of the American Academy Of Dramatic Arts. In 1952, the Carnegie Playhouse, an off-Broadway venue, took over. By 1966, the 300-seat Carnegie Hall Cinema was in operation, and in 1987, Cineplex Odeon made the space into two small movie theaters.

With the end of that last commercial lease in 1997, planning began for the new endeavor. Polshek Partnership Architects, the firm in charge of Carnegie Hall’s 1979-91 restoration, were chosen as architects for Zankel Hall. Through these years of work, James Polshek says his firm has “come to understand the spirit of the place. We have discovered the language of the building. We have come to read Carnegie Hall as a kind of musical text. There is a spirit to it. The biggest challenge is to create an audience performance volume with natural acoustics.”

To get the necessary volume, daytime construction crews are removing 6,500 cubic yards of rock from beneath the building, placing the debris in dumpsters lined up on Seventh Avenue. The main hall upstairs is shored up by a network of steel columns and beams during excavation and construction.

The result will be a 96-foot-long and 55-foot-wide rectangular auditorium within an encircling, load-bearing, ellipse-shaped wall. The ceiling will be 30 feet high at the top of the stage. Patrons will enter Zankel Hall through a new entrance on Seventh Avenue, then move down one level to the mezzanine or continue down to the parterre level. The Arron Auditorium will be a column-free space that will seat a maximum of 688 on the two levels.

Auerbach and Associates, the New York- and San Francisco-based theater and media facilities design firm, worked with Polshek Partnership and Carnegie Hall to develop the basic concept of the design of the room. “There are two driving forces behind the entire technical design—flexibility and economy of operations,” explains Steve Friedlander, Auerbach’s vice president.

Auerbach designed a “completely integrated system of lifts, rigging and lighting,” Friedlander adds. Two of the most innovative features are the nine lifts under the main floor and 12 portable chair wagons containing 336 of the hall’s seats.

The nine lifts allow four hall configurations: an end stage with raked seating (with or without an orchestra pit), a raised center stage with seats arranged around the performers, a flat floor at its lowest level for educational programs, and finally, a raised flat floor to accommodate banquets.

The chair wagons move on air cushions and can be quickly and easily repositioned or taken off the floor entirely to a storage garage behind the stage. The floors will primarily be of maple.

Overhead there is a series of 21 self-climbing technical trusses measuring approximately 9' X 13' each. These units hold lighting, sound system equipment and acoustic reflector panels, says Friedlander.

Through computer-generated renderings, architects and designers can plan what the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall will one day look like.

Space limitations prevent room for catwalks, so this rigging will enable light and sound adjustment with a minimum of effort. Utilizing the moveable trusses reduces the difficulty of servicing overhead equipment, especially when the room is a tiered-seating arrangement. No need to get the ladders out. “In between each of the sets of truss units is a winched batten that provides hanging capability” for drapery or more lighting, he says. Internal cable routes are being installed. Video conferencing will be another option, as will delayed or real-time interactive transmission. Broadcast trucks can come in and run their own cable into the hall with minimal difficulty.

There are two other acoustical considerations. One is the penetration from external vibration from the subway system, as the N and R subways rumble right under Seventh Avenue. Carnegie Hall’s Ohnesorg says the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is “isolating the subway and there will be a new layer for the entire track. They have improved the entire situation and are working to make it even better.”

The other acoustical concern is to isolate the new hall from the existing one above. Christopher Jaffe, principal at Jaffe Holden Scarbrough Acoustics in Norwalk, Connecticut—the firm handling Zankel Hall acoustics—says the new ceiling “is actually suspended on vibration isolators.” He then describes the hall’s portable reflectors that his firm designed: “They are framed reflectors of a tensile membrane—maybe a Teflon-coated vinyl material.” These can reflect the sound out to the audience in the traditional end stage configuration or be moved above the raised center stage and distribute sound in a 360-degree pattern.

Jaffe’s firm has worked on over 135 concert halls, opera houses, theaters and music pavilions in North America, and he sees Zankel Hall’s flexibility as an important direction for future facility design. The old concert halls, even the ones with superior acoustics, were designed with only a classical repertory in mind. New halls will accommodate a wider variety of programming. “I’m seeing this all over the country,” he says. “The whole idea is to open up the musical experience beyond just the classical recital, [to] bring in a broader range of music that goes beyond the Western classical tradition. We are determined to make this hall work for a broader range of programs.”

Polshek seconds that thought, remembering Judith Arron’s dream for the future of this hall: “It should be an expression of the generation to come.”