Ahead of its Time /
The background to the design of the Christchurch Town Hall auditorium
The Christchurch Town Hall auditorium is now recognised as one of the world’s finest concert halls, but in 1965, when the city held a competition to find a design for its new town hall, the question of what a modern concert hall should look like was far from certain, with recent halls in London and New York failing to meet expectations. In this abridged extract from Canterbury University Press’s new book, The Christchurch Town Hall 1965–2019: A dream renewed, Ian Lochhead explains the background to the design of our town hall.
When
Wellington, Auckland and Dunedin contemplated building their town halls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the expectation was that the new halls would follow well-established precedents that guaranteed expected outcomes of civic dignity, functionality and good acoustics. The form of the auditorium in each of these buildings followed the rectangular ‘shoebox’ layout that was tried and proven. Concert halls in both Europe and America, such as the Musikverein in Vienna (1870), the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (1888) and Symphony Hall in Boston (1900), were all recognised for the excellence of their acoustics. There seemed to be no reason to deviate from this pattern. By the 1960s, however, this consensus no longer existed. As part of the social and cultural reconstruction that sought to repair the havoc wrought by the second global conflict in a generation, there was a growing impetus to extend the reach of the arts to a much wider part of the population.
From the early 1950s architects sought to find new ways of designing auditoria that gave a more egalitarian feel to these spaces and a greater sense of involvement in the musical performances taking place within them. One of the first of these halls was the Royal Festival Hall in London, designed by Leslie Martin and opened during the Festival of Britain in 1951. As an exercise in modernist design it was a notable success, with the auditorium surrounded by generous foyers and clear circulation paths, but the acoustic of the hall itself was problematic, with the consensus being that the sound was too dry and lacked resonance. One of the formal
characteristics of the hall was that, in comparison with the admired nineteenth-century examples, it was considerably wider in relation to its length. This configuration allowed more of the audience to be seated in closer proximity to the concert platform and created a greater sense of a shared experience, but its impact on the hall’s acoustics was neither anticipated nor fully understood.
This is not the place to examine the complex problems of concert-hall design in the 1950s and 1960s, but it is worth looking at two further examples to illustrate the situation that confronted the architects of the new Christchurch Town Hall. Perhaps the best known, and some might say notorious, concert hall of the 1960s was New York’s Philharmonic Hall (1962, now known as the David Geffen Hall), intended as the city’s flagship musical venue as part of the prestigious Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Designed by the architect Max Abramovitz in conjunction with the acoustic consultants Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the hall was initially intended to follow the internal form of Symphony Hall in Boston. However, public pressure resulted in a redesign of the space to increase its capacity, resulting in the interior becoming wider in relation to its length. The acousticians warned that this change would cause the hall to perform differently from their original proposal and this proved to be the case. As a result of its problematic acoustic, Philharmonic Hall has undergone a complete internal rebuild and multiple smaller adjustments to improve its sound (as well as several name changes), but dissatisfaction with the hall as a venue for orchestral concerts persists.
As Christchurch was anticipating the design and construction of its new town hall, the citizens of Sydney
were already witnessing the initial construction phase of Jørn Utzon’s design for the city’s opera house, spectacularly sited on the promontory of Bennelong Point, jutting into the water at the end of Circular Quay opposite the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Utzon had won an international design competition in 1959 with a proposal that was sculpturally daring but which presented unprecedented engineering challenges. Steadily rising costs and the increasingly acrimonious disputes between Utzon and the New South Wales Government, which eventually led to the Danish architect’s resignation in 1966, illustrated the potential hazards of building modern performing arts complexes. The Sydney Opera House was eventually opened in 1973 at a cost of A$102 million.
The protracted problems experienced in Sydney were ones that Christchurch was eager to avoid. Nevertheless, as the Christchurch City Council embarked on building the city’s town hall in 1965, it is unlikely that it realised that there had seldom been a more challenging moment to be embarking on such a project. In comparison with the problems about to be confronted by the architects and their acoustic consultant, the difficulties of finding a site and ensuring that there were sufficient funds to pay for the building were, in retrospect, relatively straightforward.
Architects sought to find new ways of designing auditoria that gave a more egalitarian feel to these spaces and a greater sense of involvement in the musical
performances taking place within them.
The Christchurch Town Hall 1965–
2019: A dream renewed. Edited by Ian Lochhead and published by CUP, $59.99. To purchase visit canterbury. ac.nz/engage/cup/new. The book recounts the challenges leading to the town hall’s completion in 1972 and the process by which it was repaired, strengthened and refurbished prior to its reopening in February 2019.