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Jazz at Lincoln Center
No Improvisation at House of Swing
by Dave Platter
The new Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle in Manhattan
celebrated its grand opening in February, but one portion
of the building remains closed to the public.
That's because construction on Jazz at Lincoln Center's new
home, the 100,000-sq.-ft. Frederick P. Rose Hall, is still
under way.
The most difficult element of the project has been the 1,230-seat
Rose Theater, the largest of Rose Hall's performance spaces,
according to Douglas De Phillips, the Turner Construction
Co. project executive who has been overseeing the project
for almost five years on behalf of a joint venture between
Turner and Santa Fe Construction.
Rose Theater is literally a box within a box, said Paul Logan,
Jazz at Lincoln Center's project director for the development.
While the theater is neatly nestled inside the larger building,
only on its underside do the two structures actually touch.
"The separation is real and it exists on five of six
sides of the cube," Logan added.
Even underneath Rose Theater, not a single rigid structural
connection links it to the larger building. Instead, it rests
on stacks of 18-in.-high rubber and steel isolation pads that
prevent the transmission of vibrations between the theater
and the building.
All of this concrete, steel and rubber is soundproofing applied
on a colossal scale. It is effective enough to reduce the
level of background noise so that acousticians give the theater
a rating of N1, which refers to the background noise level
for building systems. The rating describes a level of quiet
at which most human ears cannot detect any building-related
noises.
Besides Rose Theater, Rose Hall consists of the 600-seat
Allen Room with its staggering view of Columbus Circle and
Central Park, the more intimate 140-seat Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola
and the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame multimedia exhibition space.
Despite being so difficult to build, the soundproofing in
Rose Theater and the other spaces will be much less visible
to audiences than other, more obvious features. "You
look at a theater and see the ceilings, the millwork and the
floor finishes, and you think 'That's the difficult part,'"
said De Phillips.
"In the beginning, I thought that myself. But it's not
really the finishes that make this job complex. It's making
sure the infrastructure is tested and works perfectly before
you begin your finishes."
The complexity of these hidden underpinnings jacked up Rose
Hall's construction costs. A typical high-end retail space
can cost about $210 per sq. ft. to build out, but hard costs
for Rose Hall are more than $740 per sq. ft., or a total of
$74 million, De Phillips said.
Total project costs are $128 million, a representative of
Jazz at Lincoln Center said.
Another element of soundproofing, this one implemented throughout
Rose Hall, involved supersizing by as much as 500 percent
the ductwork for the ventilation system. In larger ducts,
air moves more slowly, and thus relatively noiselessly.
All the spaces, even the two rehearsal rooms and the lobby,
are fitted with performance lighting and sound systems that
demand large amounts of power. The construction team is also
laying the groundwork for a control center, to be finished
later, for all of Rose Hall.
To make that possible, conduits full of wiring stream in
from every corner of the project, creating a congested crossroads.
De Phillips estimated that his team has installed more than
20 mi. of wiring conduit and more than 60 mi. of cabling in
Rose Hall.
Coordinating the placement of the voluminous ducts and conduits
required more than a year of planning, 12 times what it might
take in a retail space of the same size. Conduits had to be
widely spaced to avoid electrical interference between wires,
and in some places there are layers of conduits several feet
wide and six levels high.
In the Allen Room, Scenic Technologies Inc. is installing
a seating system that De Phillips said allows audience seating
to be changed between amphitheater and tiered platform arrangements.
Rather than the usual lightweight temporary structures, these
tiers are constructed from solid concrete and maple flooring
and require a powerful motor to move them.
The larger Rose Theater is also flexible and can be transformed
from a proscenium theater, suitable for opera or a Broadway
show, into a jazz setting in which the audience and musicians
are much closer to each other.
To make the switch, 11 three-story seating towers are deployed.
Each weighs approximately 23,000 lbs., but their remarkable
design includes air casters that allow just two people to
move them about by hand. Meanwhile, above the stage, a four-panel
retractable roof is lowered into place to direct the sound
of the performance out into the audience.
In April 2003, an unexplained but furious early morning fire
destroyed electrical transformers, elevators, escalators,
ductwork, equipment and stored materials in Rose Hall. The
fire erased three to four months of work and forced more aggressive
timing throughout the remaining schedule, Logan said.
Logan and De Phillips expect to be substantially finished
by July. The curtains are set to rise on the first performance
in October.
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