Reprinted From

AUGUST 2019

LINDE CENTER FOR MUSIC AND LEARNING BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

BY BETH BROOME

BOSTON, MA Linde Center for Music and Learning | Lenox, Massachusetts | William Rawn Associates Open Season A new complex builds on Tanglewood’s embrace of the outdoors. BY BETH BROOME PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT BENSON

CENTER STAGE Unlike Ozawa Hall and the Shed, where openings are behind the audience, Studio E and the other pavilions here have walls that open behind the stage, allowing the landscape to become part of the performance experience. to figure out ways to make Tanglewood more accessible to everyone—make it more than just a conservatory,” because of increasing professional competition. Though the center was first envisioned as a single building next to Ozawa Hall, the architects broke down the volume so as not to make it imposing. “This was also an opportunity to engage the landscape in different ways,” says WRA design principal Cliff Gayley, “including the spaces between programmatic elements, so you could experience the joy of passing through the landscape as you went room to room.” Working with Reed Hilderbrand landscape architects (which is engaged in an ongoing project to unify and enhance the larger campus), the design team relocated the site up the hill to a former overflow parking lot, because, says Rawn, “We wanted these studios to partake of the lawn as the other buildings do.” Says Reed Hilderbrand principal Adrian Nial, “We moved a lot of earth, but the

or musicians and music lovers worldwide, top-ranked Seiji Ozawa Hall, with its towering FTanglewood, in the idyllic Berkshires of brick facades and barrel-vaulted roof. The Linde Western Massachusetts, is widely considered treads more softly—a family of three boxy western- hallowed ground. Founded in 1937, it hosts one red-cedar-clad performance studios with zinc- of the globe’s preeminent music festivals and is coated copper standing-seam shed roofs and a the summer retreat for the Boston Symphony low-slung cafeteria, linked by a serpentine covered Orchestra (BSO). The venue has been graced by walkway. Sitting atop a ridge that runs across the legendary figures from Leonard Bernstein and campus, the handsome, plainspoken buildings Aaron Copland to Bob Dylan and Lady Gaga. But embrace a 100-year-old red oak tree and the vistas it is equally celebrated for its breathtaking campus, beyond. composed of two former estates whose 524 The 24,000-square-foot Tanglewood Music pastoral acres spill out across woodlands and large Center fellowship program addresses the needs of swaths of manicured lawns, dotted with canopy both the Tanglewood Music Fellowship Program trees, that open to views of the gently rolling and the just-launched Tanglewood Learning scenery. Tanglewood, says BSO president and CEO Institute, an initiative offering activities to the Mark Volpe, “is the gestalt of music, nature, and public, such as art classes, film screenings, and p e d a g o g y.” lectures. Additionally, the Center brings, with its While the beautiful pastoral setting has always flexible interiors, much-needed new programming been the core of the Tanglewood experience, the space to the campus. The biggest pavilion, the campus’s built environment is also steeped in 3,950-square-foot Studio E, with its retractable history, with Eliel and Eero Saarinen the first tiered seating, hosts everything from BSO architects to have left their mark here. The simple rehearsals to movies and banquets. And, as the structures scattered across the grounds—like only fully climate-controlled buildings here, the diminutive wood-framed camp-like practice Center can be used off-season. studios or the 5,700-seat fan-shaped Koussevitzky Rawn’s design sprang from a notion he calls Music Shed (a steel canopy over a dirt floor, “intensity and informality,” which Tanglewood inspired by Eliel’s original design)—project a no- embodies in its rigorous standards yet casual nonsense attitude and are open to the outdoors, atmosphere, where barriers between audiences and sending music wafting out, from the trilling of a performers are diminished, and where by day the string quintet to the triumphal swelling of a full public uses the grounds as a park. “Tanglewood’s BSO rehearsal. New additions to this landscape are democratic spirit captivated me 30 years ago, as not undertaken lightly. it still does today,” says William Rawn, founding That makes the Linde Center for Music and principal, who took lessons learned from his first Learning by Boston’s William Rawn Associates project here, particularly strategies for connecting THE HILLS ARE ALIVE The complex sits up the hill from Rawn’s (WRA) especially significant: completed in June, the audience to the outdoors with abundant celebrated Seiji Ozawa Hall (opposite top) and includes a low- it is Tanglewood’s first major construction in 25 apertures, like Ozawa Hall’s 50-foot-wide barn slung cafeteria that looks out to a 100-year-old oak tree. years, since the completion in 1994 of WRA’s burly, door. But now, he points out, “it’s doubly important terrace, and one young man, lost in the score in front of him, played an invisible string instrument. All the studios were in full swing. People dropped in on a piano master class in Studio E, the moody chords of Chopin filling the space. Beyond the pupil and mentor, the oak leaves wavered in the breeze as curious visitors paused to take in the scene, just as the architects intended, extending Tanglewood’s legacy by engaging with the making of music from yet another vantage point. ■

credits ARCHITECT: William Rawn Associates - PROJECT COST: $32.5 million William Rawn, Clifford Gayley, principals; Kevin Bergeron, project architect; COMPLETION DATE: June 2019 Elizabeth Bondaryk, Ewelina Peszt, team SOURCES CONSULTANTS: Reed Hilderbrand CURTAIN WALL, WINDOWS, (landscape); Kirkegaard Associates ENTRANCES: EFCO (acoustics, audiovisual); Nextstage Design (theater); LeMessurier OPERABLE GLASS PARTITIONS: Consultants (structural); Vanderweil NanaWall Engineers (m/e/p/fp, IT, security); Foresight Land Services (civil) GLAZING: Viracon, Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope

GENERAL CONTRACTOR: METAL LOUVERS: Industrial Louvers Consigli Construction Company MOISTURE BARRIER: Carlisle

CLIENT: Boston Symphony Orchestra CEILINGS: Armstrong, 9Wood

PAINTS & STAINS: Benjamin Moore SIZE: 24,000 square feet

HIT A HIGH NOTE The fronts of the Gordon Family Studio (above) and Studio E (opposite) fully retract. A serpentine walk links the complex’s four buildings. goal was to make it feel as if it had not been manipulated—that it had always been that way.” The studios within the complex are trapezoidal, their side walls splaying away from the performing area to push the sound out into the room and allow the abundant use of glass. Acoustics (on which WRA collaborated with Kirkegaard Associates) and a desire for simple forms also drove the team to use shed roofs, which enable the optimal ceiling height, with more compression over the stage area. The volumes are scattered on the site, rather than aligned. “This gives a sense that they aren’t quite perfect,” says Rawn, pointing to other structures here. “The intensity is in their finely tuned acoustics.” While the complex stands out as a more refined version of its predecessors, it complements them in its modesty. The glazed lower ends of the studios—the larger two of which have fully retractable glass walls—create a dialogue between outside and inside and between the people occupying these spaces and the spontaneous audience that can materialize from passersby. (On hot days, these air conditioned spaces will undoubtedly remain closed, however, challenging the ideal of flooding the campus with sound.) The maple-lined interiors are elegantly spare; the drama comes from the landscape, visible beyond the performance areas. These connections to the larger world will surely energize and inspire musicians and audiences accustomed to more typically cloistered facilities. Outside, the winding walkway links the studios at their front ends, creating a community out of the discrete, intimate spaces. The cafeteria is strictly utilitarian, though its glass front also slides open, expanding the dining area outdoors beneath a broad overhang. On a recent sweltering afternoon, students conversed on the cafeteria’s