As winter approaches, the enclosure of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center is nearing completion. According to Vice President for Administration Claude Rounds, the building is scheduled to be enclosed before December. The construction of the $145 million EMPAC is expected to be structurally complete at the end of Spring 2007, and after the installation of building equipment and infrastructure, will be functionally complete by May 2008. It is scheduled to open with a celebration the following fall.
Some of the enclosures used over this Winter will be temporary, as the large skylight window has not arrived, but the building will be watertight through the winter to protect the wooden interior. EMPAC’s main feature—a 1,200 person concert hall—is inside a structure resembling the hull of a 90 foot high, 200 foot long wooden ship made of red western cedar.
In addition to the concert hall, EMPAC has a 400-seat theater, 3,500 and 2,500 square-foot black-box studios seating up to 240 and 120, respectively, a 1,400 square-foot rehearsal and dance studio, four studios for artists-in-residence, and several other recording, broadcast, editing, and post-production studio spaces.
Assistant Vice President for Capital Projects Oleh Turczak described the engineering challenge of building such a structure, which required the wood used to have a two-dimensional curvature and all the steel work to be almost perfectly connected. This was done with the use of a three-dimensional modeling program called Rhino, which mitigated some of the tougher engineering challenges.
Rounds described the project in terms of its many firsts and milestones. For instance, EMPAC’s curtain wall—a 300-foot wall of glass in the concert hall facing Troy—is held together with steel pipes that have a water-glycol mixture running through them to keep the building’s climate stable and to heat the atrium space outside of the concert hall. Additionally, the EMPAC project required the most concrete poured in the Capital Region—17,000 cubic yards—since the construction of the Egg (the performing-arts center in the Empire State Plaza) in 1966. Most importantly, perhaps, are the acoustic qualities of the building itself—designed so that sounds in one room cannot be heard in any other. To accomplish this, three of the areas in EMPAC actually sit on hundreds of springs to maintain acoustic separation from the overall building.
As for building efficiency, Rounds indicated that EMPAC “is a design meant to be sustainable.” With the aid of a $500,000 energy grant, EMPAC will be replete with energy-efficient equipment. Additionally, despite its construction on the side of a cliff with a 30-degree slope, Rounds indicated that there is less storm water runoff from the hill than there was before the improvements to South campus began.
As the exterior of EMPAC nears completion, the entire South campus area will see significant improvements. For several years, there has been a lot of activity in the area—including the construction of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, the parking garage, and a large amount of infrastructure underground to support the electrical, water, and climate-control needs of both EMPAC and the Biotech Center.
Turczak indicated that the area he has dubbed the “Research Quad” (the area in between the Materials Research Center, the Biotech Center, and the Folsom Library) will see significant landscaping and walkway improvements as the work on EMPAC moves inside. So far, it has been a nearly one-year process of outfitting the interior of EMPAC which is projected to proceed in early 2008. The exterior of EMPAC will be structurally complete and the surrounding campus will see many landscaping improvements within the near future.
