As work went down to the wire on the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, architect Susan Rainier couldn’t help but imagine the relief she’d feel when it was over, at long last. “I’m just hoping I don’t start bawling,” said Rainier, project manager for UC Davis. “There’s been so many sleepless nights for me. I wondered if I’d even live to see the opening.”
The $57 million, 103,637-sq.-ft. Mondavi Center opened last October and Rainier did see it happen after three years of work. The spectacular structure—touted as the “Kennedy Center of the West Coast”—features an 1,800 seat concert hall for music, dance, and theater, as well as public speakers and a 250-seat studio theater, which will most often be used for student rehearsal and performance. The center’s splashy inaugural season will bring Broadway shows, plays, and opera and the likes of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, physicist Stephen Hawking, and tap dancer Savion Glover to Davis.
Also included in the project: a 709-car parking garage, surface parking for 905 cars, a new roadway leading to nearby Interstate 80 and a 1-acre entry park.
The building was designed by Portland, Oregon-based Boora Architects. Consultants included engineering firms Arup and Morton and Pitalo Inc.; acoustical experts McKay, Conant, Brook Inc. and theater and lighting design firms Auerbach + Associates and Auerbach+Glasow, respectively. The Roseville office of general contractor McCarthy Building Cos. managed about 100 subcontractors.
Rainier said the project’s biggest obstacle was the university-required delivery method: a six-week, lump-sum bidding process. Senior project manager Charlie Murr of McCarthy said that between June of 2000 and February of 2002, progress was often snarled by the slow process of flushing out errors, finding solutions, then finally receiving approval to make changes before the project architect was given the authority to direct work on site. “It’s a fantastic product,” he said, “but everybody on it is beat to hell.”
Given just a one-month window for delays, there was plenty of pressure to go around for a project that was highly visible, sitting just off of Interstate 80, about 15 miles west of Sacramento and 73 miles east of San Francisco.
The new center, funded through discretionary funds and private donations, is part of some dramatic changes at UCD, including a $42 million Plant and Environmental Sciences Building which opened for the new school year. A $95 million Genome and Biomedical Center is due next year, as is a $25 million institute for the study of food and wine.
The center itself, a sort of box-within-a-box built with a steel bearing frame on 200 concrete piers, turned out to be less trouble. Even the building’s complex smoke-purge system, which includes use of the front doors as dampers, Rainier noted proudly, passed inspection on the first try.
The university was charged a premium for theater experience, she said, but that paid off. Because of prequalifying of subcontractors, she said, the miles of wiring and complex work inside the concert halls went “effortlessly and flawlessly.”
Though the concert hall involved a highly specialized design to maximize acoustics and sight lines for future audiences, the rest of the structure, she said, is deceptively simple: “The rest is just the size. It’s not a lab building or a hospital, but it’s big—the ducts are 5 feet around to reduce noise.” Because the acoustical work means the building’s core is not filled with typical linear surfaces, it resulted in some interesting outcomes elsewhere. Take the roof, which Murr said has 29 different elevations.
Principal architect Stanley Boles imagined concert nights at the building when its glass face is “lit like a lantern” and the lobby and entrance will be buzzing with activity. He said the design team balanced functionality with two concepts: a nod toward both the area and UCD’s agricultural history and a lobby that is itself a sort of stage.
To begin with, natural materials were chosen, including light-tan veneer sandstone from India and slate pavers on both the exterior and inside the lobby. Glass walls to both the lobby and studio theater further blur the line between inside the building and out. The university’s arboretum adjoins the structure. Inside the main concert hall itself, materials include wood from fir logs salvaged from the bottom of Ruby Lake, Ontario, and bamboo.
Boles said he didn’t want “a lot of fluff” that would “look dated in five years.” Ranier said the result is a sleek, modern design that because of the warm, natural materials “has a kind of Zen feeling.”
“The thing I’ve been impressed with is the overall character and feeling of it,” Boles said. “I think it has sort of a feeling of intimacy, even as big as it is. We didn’t want it to be intimidating. We wanted it to be inviting for people in tuxedos and people in blue jeans and cowboy boots.”
Visitors entering the lobby step into a three-story, 40-ft. glass box with open stairwells, glass-railed balconies and terraces – a space created for those who enjoy seeing and being seen. “You want the whole experience to be memorable,” Boles said.
Seating in the building’s main concert hall, with its 75-ft. ceiling, occurs on three levels, with the farthest seat 104 ft. from the stage. The arch of the proscenium (the area between the orchestra and curtain) and the double orchestra lifts create a forestage allowing the orchestra to play in the same room with the audience. Architectural lighting, too, can vary with performance, through a mix of fiber-optic “star lights” in the chandelier, balcony front and box lights, as well as wall-washers and recessed down-lights.
The studio theater was designed for flexibility, with movable seating and staging areas so that it can be used as an arena theater, banquet hall, or lecture room. Adjacent dressing rooms, food servery, and storage areas operate independently of the main concert hall. A “technical street” allows staging equipment to be moved along the length of the structure.
Among the building’s unique features is its heating and cooling system, which introduces air at floor level as opposed to at the ceiling, providing both acoustical and energy-saving benefits. Under the main concert hall is a basement space ranging in height from 4 to 6 feet. Hollow cavities are also located under the balconies. Because the air is introduced at the floor, it does not need to be super-chilled; nor does it have to be blown down, allowing for the use of smaller, quieter fan motors.
As work came to a close, Rainier—whose office fielded some 3,000 requests for information and answers from subcontractors—said she would not trade the experience, her first in theaters, after projects like gymnasiums and skyscrapers.
For her, working on the center included everything from a one-week theater design course at Harvard to giving what felt like hundreds of tours she hadn’t known were part of her job description. “It’s been an education,” she said.
No Expenses Spared
For all its style, the Mondavi Center is designed to step out of the way, to let performers be seen and, even more importantly, be heard.
“You’re going through all that trouble and spending all that money,” principal architect Stanley Boles said, “and all it really comes down to is seeing and hearing well in one room.” Jackson Hall, the structure’s collaboratively designed main performance room, is a 75-ft.-tall box-within-a-box, with clear sight lines for all 1,800 audience members.
Acoustical designer Ron McKay of McKay, Conant, Brook Inc., said the key to the hall’s design was isolating it from the sounds of nearby Interstate 80 and train tracks.
An analysis of the floor vibrations at the nearby UC Davis Alumni Center aided the design of the basement, which also houses the chamber feeding the cooling system. A lined duct to deaden sound backs each grill that feeds cool air into the hall.
The hall is lined with sandstone panels—tilted at precise angles to reflect sound toward Douglas fir panels—and plaster ceilings that are curved to intercept sound waves being distributed to the crowd.
Moreover, each piece of the room is part of the acoustical puzzle: whether it’s the double doors that whisper rather than clank shut or perforated seat bottoms so designed that, if a seat is empty, it still absorbs sound.
The varied sorts of performances planned for the hall mandate that its acoustics be flexible—to, as Boles said, “enhance the spoken word or give you that lovely reverberation of the last notes of a symphony.”
Three major components allow reverberation to be altered from one second to two, McKay explained:
- The orchestra shell, a sort of “movable garage” at the back of the stage, can be brought forward on air casters. Most of the orchestra sits inside of the shell, the rest on a forestage created by lifts, allowing the orchestra to play in the same room as its audience.
- An acoustical canopy made of a steel frame with curved fir panels above the stage can be raised or lowered. The canopy that lets the string section hear the brass also reflects the first sounds the audience hears. The quicker those sounds arrive, the more intimate and smaller the room feels.
- Velour drapes, lowered from an attic space and from wooden grilles along the walls to reduce reverberation.
“No expense was spared in regard to acoustics,” said the university’s project manager, architect Susan Rainier. “That was our No. 1 priority.”
Author Cory Golden is a writer for McGraw-Hill Construction.
Originally published 1st quarter 2003, in arcCA 03.1, “Common Knowledge.”
