Thursday 11 July from 5.30pm.
Turner Sims, Highfield Campus.
Public lecture.
Thirty Years of Auditorium Design.
E J Richards Lecture.
The acoustic design of major auditoria – in particular concert halls and opera houses – has benefited from significant advances in acoustic parameter prediction and measurement techniques over the last 50 years. The objective parameters themselves, used to predict subjective responses to performance sound, have, however, shown less development.
Quite recently, the development of auralisation techniques has resulted in a paradigm shift in auditorium acoustic design. Nevertheless, our current auditoria designs can be shown to be as affected by people – strong personalities, reputations and fashions – as much as by scientific application. The “art or science” question still has validity.
In this lecture, one of the world’s leading auditorium acoustic designers will discuss how auditorium design has developed in the years that the ISVR has existed, based on his own projects including Bridgewater Hall Manchester, Glyndebourne Opera House, the Royal Opera House London, the Wales Millennium Centre, Oslo and Copenhagen Opera Houses, and concert halls in Sydney, Bruges, Kristiansand and London.
Rob Harris is an acoustic engineer, auditorium acoustic designer and theatre consultant, and leads Arup’s arts and culture business in the UK, Middle East and Africa.
Recent projects include the Kings Place recital hall in London, the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin and the Kristiansand Performing Arts Centre in Norway.
His credits include the Britten Opera Theatre at the Royal College of Music, Glyndebourne Opera House, the refurbishment of the Royal Opera House in London, the Wales Millennium Centre, the Operaen Copenhagen, the Oslo Opera House, and the refurbishment of the concert hall of the Royal College of Music, for which he led the theatre systems engineering team. He was elected a Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering in July 2009.