Romantic is the notion of renovating a vintage movie palace, its walls reverberating with images of stars from the past and the voices of the greats.

In reality, such a project can be challenging for the architects, consultants, and acousticians, as they face these ghosts of the past in order to create a technically modern theatre. A case in point is The Paramount Theatre in Boston, renovated as part of the Emerson College Paramount Center and its performing arts campus. Five years in the making, The Paramount opened last winter, and 2010-11 is its first official season.

“The whole building was in disrepair after being empty for many years,” says Steven Friedlander, principal-in-charge at Auerbach Pollock Friedlander (APF) for the Emerson College Paramount Center and the firm’s New York office. “Very little historic fabric was intact. Some of the reliefs remained, but most of the murals were damaged and falling off.” Donald Guyton, senior associate in the New York office, who served as project manager, adds, “Elkus Manfredi Architects did extensive research into the original building, which opened in 1932, and other Paramount Theatres across the country from the same era.”

For Elkus Manfredi, Howard Elkus was the partner-in-charge, Ross Cameron was the project architect, and Robert Koup was the design architect through design development. This is the second historic renovation project for this team at Emerson College. The first was the Cutler Majestic Theatre, just a few blocks away. “The college is committed to developing its downtown campus, and the Paramount property was perfectly located near its other facilities,” notes Cameron. “The college is using both theatres as the base for a performance series designed to attract artists that would otherwise not be able to perform in Boston.”

This time, one of the biggest challenges was redefining the shape of the room. “The original Paramount Theatre was a fairly narrow room and could not be expanded beyond the original footprint, requiring a creative approach to the stage and audience area design,” says Friedlander. Major changes were required to convert the original 1,700-seat movie theatre into a 596-seat proscenium theatre. The new seats by Irwin Seating Company (Rialto with Cascade end standards) are upholstered in a Dijon-mustard tone in keeping with the warm look of the room.

“In order to provide a stage with appropriate depth and fly loft-height for live performances, the original stage area was demolished, and the new stage was expanded toward the house,” Friedlander points out. “The balcony and rear of the theatre were reconfigured to improve sightlines, and the proscenium zone, including cheek walls and forestage ceiling, was rebuilt to join the remaining side walls and ceiling of the house.”

ACOUSTICS
Robert Berens, supervisory consultant for Acentech, based in Cambridge, MA, notes that the main acoustical challenge was the room’s geometry, since it was originally very long with a shallow stage. “When the stage was pulled forward into the house to create full stage house and orchestra pit, the volume of the room changed, and the front-to-back dimensions changed, but not the side-to-side or floor-to-ceiling distances,” he says. “The room is much more intimate now.”

A large, open grillwork—called “the fan”—that was flat to the ceiling in the original theatre has been brought down as far as possible and canted to serve as an acoustic eyebrow over the proscenium and provide reinforcement for natural voices. “We would have dropped it even further, but there were many historical considerations,” says Berens. “This was a historically informed renovation, not an actual restoration. We met early on with Auerbach Pollock Friedlander to discuss the architectural desires and constraints of the project. For the architects and consultants, the issue was how to carve out pilasters with false fronts for the speakers. Their flexibility was limited due to the historic renovation aspects.”

Berens discovered that the building was so far gone that it was hard to tell what the acoustics were like originally. “In the renovation, we focused more on the natural spoken voice for theatrical, not musical, productions and a lot of modeling on the electro-acoustics in the theatre, for both the natural and amplified speaking voice,” explains Berens, who uses CATT-Acoustic, an architectural acoustics program, for modeling and ray tracing. “We played with the balcony fronts to avoid both slap back from the stage to the balcony front and from the center cluster back to the stage. There are hard surfaces all the way around, less reverberant with a full house. The people act as absorbers. With such a big, high volume, we didn’t want to fuzz up the side walls; we knew the audience would provide enough absorption.”

Once the decorative proscenium arch was reconstructed and the art deco recreated, the central cluster couldn’t dangle in front of the artwork on the proscenium. The coordination of where the speakers are hung was between APF and the architects, who provided data to fit the cluster into the acoustic model of the room. “As a result, the cluster is very high up,” says Berens, “and when not needed, it can be retracted behind ‘the fan’ and pretty much disappears.”

The theatre is part of Emerson’s Paramount Center, which includes the old adjoining Arcade building (its façade was kept; the rest is new steel from the ground up). “The complex includes a beautiful new black box, film screening room, dorms, sound production facilities, rehearsal spaces, and a nice gem of a theatre as part of the deal,” says Berens.

The biggest challenge for Berens was the issue of sound isolation. “All these spaces are right next to each other—set shops, sound stages, rehearsal spaces, restaurant, dorms—so there are floating floors and double wall construction where possible,” he points out. “Fortunately The Paramount is pretty much a standalone, although we couldn’t isolate it from the subway noise. The theatre is pretty far from the sidewalk, which helps shield it. You hear the subway more in the black box.”

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