Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Met Museum eliminates dead spots in historic auditorium
AV Magazine: The auditorium was opened in 1954 as a purely acoustic hall, designed primarily to showcase instruments from the Met’s own collection with no amplification intended. At the time, the 700-capacity venue was equipped with early-generation powered column speakers positioned only on the left and right sides of the room.
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The work of integrating new technology into old buildings is a task which is consistently needed and consistently difficult. In my mind there are two broad situations. One is that there is a very old, historic, building and the challenge is to keep the visual aesthetic of the building as original as possible, while enabling some form of new feature. It generally seems like these kinds of organizations have relatively full pockets, and can fund some really interesting engineering to solve their unique challenges. I think that this kind of work is fascinating, and hope to be able do some of it in my career.
The other category of old buildings is venues that desperately need something, but don’t have the money to do it, much less build a new building. In my experience these projects are never super satisfactory, because the solution is almost always sub-optimal in some way or another. This kind of work can bring up interesting challenges of figuring out what the priorities of the venue are, even if they are different from initially expected.
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