On September 1, the Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires of Massachusetts wraps up its annual summer season. But for the first time in its long history, Tanglewood is positioning itself as a year-round event and meeting space, thanks to the addition of the four-building Linde Center for Music and Learning, which opened last June 28.
The $33 million complex, designed by William Rawn Associates Architects and built by Consigli Construction, represents the first fundamental expansion on Tanglewood’s 524-acre campus since Ozawa Hall was built in 1994. Linde Center will support the performances and rehearsal activities of the Tanglewood Music Center, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s (BSO) summer music academy, and the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI), a new initiative that offers more than 140 wide-ranging education and enrichment programs to enhance the patron experience.
The four sustainable buildings, which target LEED Gold certification, were designed to be climate-controlled for year-round use by the Berkshire community; it can host everything from weddings to high school performances. The buildings are shaped and built with materials for the best possible acoustics, high-end HVAC systems, sound and vibration isolation treatments, wood and curtain wall façade, and intricate millwork. Solar panels—a last-minute edition to the complex’s design—are mounted on the buildings’ roofs.
Each building provides a museum-quality view of a Tanglewood landmark they collectively surround: a 100-ft-tall red oak. (Reed Hilderbrand was the project’s landscape architect.)
The four-building Linde Center sits on more than an acre of Tanglewood's campus, and surrounds an iconic, 100-ft-tall oak tree. Image: Robert Benson Photography
The buildings, which sit on more than an acre of land, break down this way:
•The 4,000-sf Studio E is equipped with technology to accommodate performance, rehearsal and educational offerings. Its retractable seating can be adjusted to support recital, chamber music and chamber orchestra performances with a seated audience of up to 250; performances by larger ensembles, with an audience of 190; rehearsals for a full orchestra as well as large ensembles; lectures for an audience of 270, and social and dining events. Robust audio-visual technology will support recording and digital learning, giving the content created in the space a global reach.
•The 1,500-sf Gordon Family Studio can seat an audience of 60;
•The 750-sf Volpe Family Studio (Mark Volpe is BSO’s president and CEO), with an audience capacity of 40, will host TMC rehearsals and performances, as well as TLI events.
•Cindy's Café, at around 6,000 sf, has 150 seats, plus 50 more on the outside patio. It's designed as an informal gathering place for musicians and audience members, serving as a hub for visitors, TMC Fellows and faculty and TLI participants.
The Linde Center is named in honor or Edward H. Linde, who chaired the BSO board for five years until his death in 2010. Linde’s wife, Joyce, chaired the TMC/TLI Initiative Committee. “This is really Joyce’s vision, to create something that would engage the younger generation in how they learn and appreciate music,” says Phil Brault, Consigli’s Project Executive.
Brault notes that Consigli’s early involvement in this project (which took 15 months to build) was critical to its success. “The design was constantly changing throughout, and that [involvement] helped us be efficient in construction.”
Large curtainwall brings the outdoors inside of Studio E, Linde Center's largest performance venue. Image: Robert Benson Photography
This was the first project of this scale where Consigli fabricated and installed the high-end millwork (produced by its fabricator in Pleasant Valley, N.Y.). Consigli also worked closely with the project’s acoustics consultant, Kirkegaard, to deliver the highest-quality acoustics to the performance and rehearsal spaces. (Brault says the Building Team nicknamed Studio E the “Swiss Watch” for its design and construction precision.)
The team even built 3D models for the cavity spaces to ensure the accuracy of material installation and construction. “Without that modeling, we would not have been able to pull this off,” says Brault.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Gold Award: Eisenhower Theater, Washington, D.C.
The Eisenhower Theater in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., opened in 1971. By the turn of the century, after three-plus decades of heavy use, the 1,142-seat box-within-a-box playhouse on the Potomac was starting to show its age. Poor lighting and tired, worn finishes created a gloomy atmosphere.
| Aug 11, 2010
Giants 300 University Report
University construction spending is 13% higher than a year ago—mostly for residence halls and infrastructure on public campuses—and is expected to slip less than 5% over the next two years. However, the value of starts dropped about 10% in recent months and will not return to the 2007–08 peak for about two years.
| Aug 11, 2010
Reaching For the Stars
The famed Griffith Observatory, located in the heart of the Hollywood hills, receives close to two million visitors every year and has appeared in such films as the classic “Rebel Without a Cause” and the not-so-classic “Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.” Complete with a solar telescope and a 12-inch refracting telescope, multiple scientific exhibits, and one of the world...
| Aug 11, 2010
The Art of Reconstruction
The Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C., completed in 1867, houses two Smithsonian Institution museums—the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum. Collections include portraits of all U.S. presidents, along with paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings of numerous historic figures from American history, and the works of more than 7,000 American artists.
| Aug 11, 2010
Silver Award: Pere Marquette Depot Bay City, Mich.
For 38 years, the Pere Marquette Depot sat boarded up, broken down, and fire damaged. The Prairie-style building, with its distinctive orange iron-brick walls, was once the elegant Bay City, Mich., train station. The facility, which opened in 1904, served the Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad Company when the area was the epicenter of lumber processing for the shipbuilding and kit homebuilding ...
| Aug 11, 2010
Bowing to Tradition
As the home to Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals—the oldest theatrical company in the nation—12 Holyoke Street had its share of opening nights. In April 2002, however, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences decided the 1888 Georgian Revival building no longer met the needs of the company and hired Boston-based architect Leers Weinzapfel Associates to design a more contemporary facility.
| Aug 11, 2010
Silver Award: Please Touch Museum at Memorial Hall Philadelphia, Pa.
Built in 1875 to serve as the art gallery for the Centennial International Exhibition in Fairmount Park, Memorial Hall stands as one of the great civic structures in Philadelphia. The neoclassical building, designed by Fairmount Park Commission engineer Hermann J. Schwarzmann, was one of the first buildings in America to be designed according to the principles of the Beaux Arts movement.
| Aug 11, 2010
Financial Wizardry Builds a Community
At 69 square miles, Vineland is New Jersey's largest city, at least in geographic area, and it has a rich history. It was established in 1861 as a planned community (well before there were such things) by the utopian Charles Landis. It was in Vineland that Dr. Thomas Welch found a way to preserve grape juice without fermenting it, creating a wine substitute for church use (the town was dry).
| Aug 11, 2010
Team Tames Impossible Site
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the nation's oldest technology university, has long prided itself on its state-of-the-art design and engineering curriculum. Several years ago, to call attention to its equally estimable media and performing arts programs, RPI commissioned British architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw to design the Curtis R.
| Aug 11, 2010
Silver Award: Hanna Theatre, Cleveland, Ohio
Between February 1921 and November 1922 five theaters opened along a short stretch of Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland, all of them presenting silent movies, legitimate theater, and vaudeville. During the Great Depression, several of the theaters in the unofficial “Playhouse Square” converted to movie theaters, but they all fell into a death spiral after World War II.
