A Sound System

Grand Facilities on Canyon's Horizon

In the heart of the Texas Panhandle 12 mi. south of Amarillo, the new 146,000-sq.-ft. Fine Arts Complex at West Texas A&M University in Canyon is expanding the school's performance spaces. The adjacent Mary Moody Northen Hall is also getting an 18,000-sq.-ft. addition.

The new complex also includes classrooms, offices and practice rooms and support facilities such as costume and scene shops in the building's basement. The $23 million project is more than 25 percent complete with delivery scheduled for August.

The complex is a structural-steel-and-poured concrete structure with a tapered rubber roof system. "The actual construction of it is not a difficult building to put together other than much of it being structural concrete and the additional forming for that," said Martin Tickle, project manager for Lee Lewis Construction Inc. of Lubbock the project's general contractor. The exterior is clad with a combination of brick and stone.

Principal architect Bill Smith of Rees Associates Inc. of Dallas said the prevalent palette of materials on campus helped provide ideas for the look of the building. "It sits right there at Palo Duro Canyon, so we actually used stone as a metaphor for the walls of the canyon," Smith said. "There's a large stone wall that runs from outside the building at the entry and knifes through and becomes the focus wall in the lobby that serves all the performance venues."

Those venues include a proscenium stage theater with fly loft, a recital hall and a flexible black-box theater space. "When you make those spaces adjacent to one another like we did, you've got some extra work to do in the walls that separate them to make sure that if you have multiple performances going on in several venues, you're not having sound going from one to another," Smith said.

Thick concrete-masonry-unit slabs with sound absorbing walls on either side address that concern.

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Even more critical on the sonic front is preventing noise from the mechanical systems from entering the theaters. "The cu. ft. per minute of air comes into the theaters at a very slow speed, so that you don't hear airborne noise," Smith said. "And there are special efforts in the ductwork, both supply and return, so that you don't pick up the machine noise."

He said that the machine rooms are isolated and have sufficiently thick slabs so that they don't transmit vibrations from the air handlers-which are low frequency-into the structure. The air-handling system is also zoned to prevent "airborne noise that could come from a practice room into the performance venues," Smith added.

Insulated sound-isolation floors on a jack system help with sound issues in some of the rooms in the complex. "The floor sits on neoprene sound-isolation pads and jacks up," Tickle said. "You pour the depression slab first. Then you go in and set the jack system. Then you go back in and pour the topping slab over it.

"Once the topping slab is cured, then you come in and jack the floor up. It creates a gap between the depression slab and the sound-isolation slab. It stops the sound from migrating into the slab and transferring into other rooms."

Smith said another problem that had to be dealt with was a railroad track not far away. "There's some work done to insulate and isolate any noises that would be coming from the occasional train," he said.

With the theater space at the building's glassed-in front adjoining a two-story stack of classrooms, offices, studios and practice spaces, it's possible to lock down the lobby for public performances and still have the rest of the building accessible for students, Smith said.

After the design was completed, a value-engineering process freed up $2 million to help accommodate the addition to Northen Hall.

Interior wood species and the roofing material were changed within the complex, and some interior limestone was replaced by drywall. The feature wall extending outside the theater lobby was reduced.

By the start of the fall semester, the structural steel frame was coming out of the ground and the project was proceeding on schedule.

Since the institution became a part of the Texas A&M system after the 1991-92 legislative session, it has positioned itself as the fine-arts magnet within the system. "It's a long-overdue facility for the campus," said Deborah Hardt, architectural project manager for the Texas A&M System. "They'll have an excellent calling card to bring students there who are interested in that curriculum."

Owner: Texas A&M System, College Station
General Contractor: Lee Lewis Construction Inc., Lubbock
Architect: Rees Associates Inc., Dallas
Structural Engineer: Jaster Quintanilla, Dallas