Three decades of planning by the arts, civic, and business leaders in Edmonds, WA culminated at the end of September 2006 with the completion of the Edmonds Center for the Arts. The $18.5 million renovation and remodeling project transformed a 1939 New Deal building, the area's first high school, into performing arts center with a 700-seat theater/concert hall.

A very ambitious undertaking for a city of 40,000 (located 15 miles north of Seattle on Puget sound), known for its active arts community, ECA (www.edmondscenterforthe arts.org) was planned with community performing arts institutions in mind: Olympic Ballet Theatre, Cascade Symphony Orchestra, Sno-King Community Chorale, and Edmonds Community College. All have scheduled performances at the center in its inaugural season. But the performance schedule includes national acts as well, ranging from classical chamber ensembles, to comedy, jazz and pop.

Transforming what was essentially a high school auditorium into a theater and concert hall was the work of numerous expert firms: Seattle's LMN Architects (www.lmnarchitects.com); acoustic and sound system design firm, JaffeHolden; theatrical consultants, Ward Design Group, Inc.; and systems installation firm, Dimensional Communications, Inc. (www.dimensional.net).

LMN retained the curved exterior of the auditorium's Art Moderne styling, along with original windows. But the foyer was opened up; bright colors and silver trim were added to highlight architectural features. The theater itself was reshaped, narrowed by trimming 200 (wood) seats.

"We reshaped the throat walls in order to improve the early reflections in the hall," says JaffeHolden acoustic designer and project manager (Santa Monica, CA office), Robin Glosemeyer. "The addition of upper and lower level box seating areas and reshaping the throat walls at the proscenium allowed us to create useful reflecting surfaces as opposed to the negative, concave surfaces of the original room that were causing focusing problems." Early reflections of sound increase clarity and the listener's sense of intimacy with the music, the sense of being in the same room with the performers.

The original rear wall of the theater on the orchestra level was concave in relation to the stage. This surface caused late reflections, or echoes, that distracted and confused performers. The rear wall was altered, slanted inward from the under balcony to the floor, thereby focusing reflected sound into the seating area.

The existing plaster ceiling was removed, exposing the wood roof deck in order to increase the volume of the room for unamplified music. "Volume in a room allows unamplified sound to bloom," says Glosemeyer. Volume adds reverberation time and makes unamplified sound more warm and full. However, increasing volume and reverberation time can be detrimental to amplified sound. "The more volume in a room, the more reverberation time. The more reflective surfaces, the less absorption, and the longer the reverberation time."

Having added volume to the hall for unamplified sound, the acoustician now had to tame the room for amplified sound by adding more absorption. The solution was a system of adjustable acoustic draperies, suspended in the upper volume of the room at the catwalks, and along the side walls at the balcony level. These variable draperies are used during amplified performances to cut down on reverberation and reflected sound, adjusting RT from 1.0 seconds for amplified programs to 1.6 seconds for chamber music and small orchestral ensembles.

The location of the catwalks was determined by the theater consultant, Ward Design Group. Glosemeyer made the catwalks do double-duty by incorporating acoustic reflector panels at the underside structure that direct more early arriving sound reflections back down into the listening space.

Sound System

JaffeHolden's sound system design for the hall (begun by Howard Rose, and seen to completion by David W. Robb) included audio and video infrastructure; all backstage, lobby, and paging systems; intercom, ADA-compliant assisted listening; and front of house and monitor systems.

Selection of the house mains system, nearly three years before the center opened, was an act of informed guess work by systems designer Robb: "At the time, there was no one with the project who could speak from a programming point of view about how the hall would be used," he says. "The project leaders were focused on seeing this building become a performing arts center. For events, they could count only current uses, such as travel-log lectures, as certain." Robb specified a system that would support much more than slide shows and lectures.

The house mains is a Left, Right, Center cluster system consisting of: three EAW MK 2364 loudspeakers for center cluster, top tier; two EAW MK2364's for side clusters, top tier; two EAW MK2394's for side clusters, bottom tier; and two portable EAW subwoofers. All are driven by Crown amps.

Continued...