The Sage Gateshead  

The Sage Gateshead is a complex containing a 1780 seat concert hall, 420 seat 3D "surround" concert hall and a new music school. The Sage opened in December 2004 in the North of England with 33 hours of music over 3 days and nights, hundreds of performers, and an audience of 15,000.  Initial response has been overwhelmingly positive.

the challenge

Acoustics was among the highest priorities in the design of the building. The client chose Robert Essert, then Associate Director of Arup Acoustics, to lead the acoustical design. Essert was in charge of the acoustical design from the start of the briefing and design (1997) through completion of design  and middle of construction (2002).  The design process was a collaborative one with architect Foster and Partners and Theatre Projects Consultants, where Essert took the lead on the 1700 seat Hall 1, and Theatre Projects took the lead on the 400 seat Hall 2.   The Brief was for the best possible acoustics - bar none - for the principal classical music user, the Northern Sinfonia, with excellence extending to symphony orchestras, recitals and an active high-quality program of folk, jazz, and music from around the world.

the solution

Essert recalls, “We were eager to create innovative rooms, but never willing to put the Client’s money at risk.  We are always learning from existing halls, old and new, good and bad.  I didn’t want to fix on a particular paradigm (“shoebox” or “vineyard”), but have learned over the years what is successful and unsuccessful about each.  This background informed the development of the auditoria from first principles, specific to the needs of Gateshead, Newcastle and the northern arts region, and breaking new ground for performance opportunity.”

In his initial sketches for Hall 1, Essert proposed a ceiling in sections that could be raised and lowered, as a means to achieving flexibility of clarity and reverberance, and the benefits of a coupled reverberant volume without the cost. This approach to the acoustical design also addressed Foster's wish for a unified room architecture, where the ceiling is complete and works with the walls in all of its possible settings.

the result 

There have been a few other halls with movable ceilings, but Hall 1 at the Sage Gateshead is the first to utilise the upper volume as a controllable coupled volume at modest cost. The ceiling can be set lower for greater intimacy and clarity – for voice and piano recitals, for example – and higher to control loudness for large symphonic works.

But the greatest advantage is the simultaneous clarity, reverberance and intensity that bring the performers and audience together. The room is so responsive that the impact of the Northern Sinfonia is more like that of a 95-piece symphony orchestra, and yet it handles amplification better than most dry concert halls.  

For Hall 2, Theatre Projects proposed a 10-sided, 2-tier room, for its compact form, flexibility and containment of emotional energy. Essert envisioned that, with some development, the 3-dimensional form would be an exciting venue for making “spatial music”. The Arup team, led by Essert, developed recommendations for convex shaping of walls and tier front balustrades to counter the focusing tendency of the form and to smooth out the frequency response for amplified events.

The performers can be at one side, or they can be in the middle of the space. Surround sound loudspeakers can be located around the perimeter of the room to encourage spatial sound composition. Theatre Projects and Fosters, working with contractors, translated our recommendations for motorised sound absorbing banners into a beautiful architectural feature of the room.  

Both of the concert halls, the large rehearsal room and the teaching studios, all have acoustic curtains that can be extended to reduce loudness and increase clarity for amplified music and speech, further extending the range of excellence.

In addition to its full musical schedule, the Sage Gateshead has already hosted the UK Labour Party conference in February 2005, the June 2005 congress of the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) and the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards 2005.

The high quality of the facility is testament to the skill and motivation of the Gateshead Council and the Client organisation that dreamed the dream and persevered.   A great success of this project is how such excellent music performance and music education are woven into an integrated organisation, and how the building so immediately has become a living part of the work, play and learning that permeates the place.  

links

Sage Gateshead Web Site:

http://www.thesagegateshead.org/

Hall 1 panorama:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tyne/content/panoramas/sage_hall_1_360.shtml

Hall 2 panorama:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tyne/content/panoramas/sage_hall_2_360.shtml

Architect: Foster and Partners:

http://www.fosterandpartners.com/