Page 42 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

The Tiara Story
42
About Tippet Rise
We had been talking with Arup Engineers in New York for years about various outdoor pavilions they’d designed. Finally, I designed my own, because we had a lot of leftover doors, and I saw them as a great way of bouncing sound to an outdoor audience.
Alban Bassuet was so horrified by my Rube Goldberg version that he leapt into action and, with Willem Boning at Arup, designed what is now the Tiara Acoustic Shell, a wall-less, roofless shed that bounces music to an outdoor crowd using only the top corners of an otherwise invisible room.
You can see from the acoustic studies how the sound lines carom off the walls. If you add in a slight over- lap from a partial roof, the secondary and tertiary sound-bounces intensify. Alban and Willem discov- ered that 90% of concert sound comes from the top edge of the walls, where they meet the ceiling.
Laura Viklund and her husband, Chris Gunn, built this “shell” in a month in Cody, Wyoming, out of plywood, drove it up to Fishtail in pieces, and put it together in a very frantic week. We’ve since moved it to another gorgeous location closer to the Olivier Music Barn.