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What Makes a Good Auditorium?
by Tina Manzer
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Design has produced an array of new ideas and concepts for auditoria and assembly space, thanks to a studio program called “Auditoria Redux.”
Funded in part by KI, a manufacturer of furniture and wall systems for the education, healthcare, government and corporate markets, the two-semester course for students of the School of Architecture & Urban Planning last year combined an intensive study of auditoria with historical, theoretical and practical knowledge and, finally, innovation strategies. Students from the studio spent a day at KI’s Milwaukee headquarters where they received an overview of the contract furniture industry, learned about the education market, reviewed the company’s product development process, and toured KI’s manufacturing facility.
No more boring spaces
The inspiration for the collaboration between UWM and KI began with a basic question: Given the evolution of so many building types, why has the auditorium building and assembly space – which play central roles at schools and universities – resisted change for the past century?
“They are universally understood as significant spaces, representing institutional and collective identity,” stated the course description. “However, a great number of recent examples appear mundane and spatially neutral, expressing little in the way of collective experience or iconic imagery.”
The description went on to ask, “Is this symptomatic of an overemphasis on flexibility or complexity of program? Or a generic material palette? What are the imagined technology advancements of the future and how could this knowledge become integrated in auditoria?
The studio proposed designs that optimized the inherent performance qualities of auditoria space and culminated with students presenting research and design concepts for the future to architects, theater consultants, educators and fabricators.
Several teams of students addressed the high consumption of energy within an auditorium by designing seats with built-in thermal heating and cooling systems, a solution often used in automobiles. Another proposal utilized stage traps and lifts to flexibly reconfigure and personalize seating arrangements and spatial formats. Students also wholly reclassified new materials for auditoria, challenging assumptions about the application of these materials.
“Auditoria Redux allowed us to examine how auditorium spaces can optimize new technologies and determine why this hasn’t occurred with greater velocity,” said Grace La, principal of Milwaukee-based La Dallman Architects and the UWM associate professor who spearheaded the project. “We were especially interested in looking at the role of research in the architecture design studio and ways to integrate the knowledge base of the industry, in this case, KI’s furniture and manufacturing expertise, to sharpen and test strategies for a more productive and focused design effort on assembly space.”
She envisions the program serving as a model of design research and interdisciplinary collaboration that empowers designers to command vast bodies of knowledge, communicate with experts and effectively apply research to real-world problems.
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