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Firehouse 12
Firehouse 12
New Haven, CT, United States
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Other Projects by Gray Organschi Architecture
Firehouse 12
New Haven, CT, United States
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2016
SIZE
5000 sqft - 10,000 sqft
BUDGET
Undisclosed
This project is the result of a long and deep collaboration with our visionary client, a jazz pianist and music producer. The work has been performed in two phases. Phase one included the painstaking refurbishment and stabilization of a historic 1905 fire station, a brick shell that had been abandoned for decades, into which were inserted a live room/recording studio that doubles as a performance space, a green room, offices, a bar and small kitchen, and an apartment. Phase two, just completed, includes the addition of a musician’s hostel on top of the brick structure, a prefabricated cross-laminated timber box that was placed atop the firehouse to accommodate musicians residing in the building during recording.
The 85 seat proscenium performance space doubles as an acoustically isolated soundstage with full technical infrastructure of isolation booths and control room. A particular design challenge lay in the dual purpose of the “live room” and its conflicting acoustical requirements: for recording, the space must be acoustically dead, while for performance, the room’s reverberant character is important. Using prototypes of material and assembly systems produced in our workshop, we developed a continuous plywood shell that transforms along its surface to create opposing acoustic conditions keyed to specific areas: at the back of the proscenium stage, the plywood shell splits and distorts to act as a diffuser; above the primary recording area at the center of the room, it undulates to refract high frequency sound. From the lobby, the plywood shell forms the exterior of the auditorium, providing a kind of internal “marquee” for the theater that wraps down to create the ceiling of the basement bar.
Within the relatively small volume of the former firehouse, a series of public and private spaces weave throughout the building and around the central sound space. An entrance lobby at the street opens down into a public cafe and bar amid the firehouse’s stone foundations below, where a new massive board formed concrete stair structure and carved buttresses resist the heavy vehicular loads from the street above. At the back of the recording studio are a “green room” for performers and an office for the owner and studio manager. Above the sound space, under the restored six foot deep structural timber roof trusses, we added a 2nd floor two-bedroom apartment and roof terrace. The curving birch plywood shells that snake through the building’s multiple levels function alternately as spatial dividers and light and sound reflectors, giving the interiors lightness and warmth to contrast the dark brick walls of the original building and providing architectural continuity and a transformed identity for the building.
Our client’s recent request to add bedrooms and spaces for more musicians presented a unique challenge. Lacking sufficient space in the existing building shell, the design team proposed a 650 square foot rooftop addition constructed from structural mass timber. Taking advantage of timber’s high strength to weight ratio and the possibility to fabricate large panels off-site in New Hampshire, the design team developed an innovative, prefabricated structural assembly anchored to the existing masonry building via a horizontal steel truss. Thanks to prefabrication and careful coordination, carpenters assembled the structural timber components on-site in less than 12 hours, reducing the addition’s overall construction time.
Completed in 2016, this is one of the first buildings in the United States to utilize cross-laminated timber throughout the building structure, featuring exposed structural timber in the interior spaces. Wood’s natural hygroscopic characteristics help regulate interior humidity and create acoustically live spaces for the musicians to practice between recording sessions.
The 85 seat proscenium performance space doubles as an acoustically isolated soundstage with full technical infrastructure of isolation booths and control room. A particular design challenge lay in the dual purpose of the “live room” and its conflicting acoustical requirements: for recording, the space must be acoustically dead, while for performance, the room’s reverberant character is important. Using prototypes of material and assembly systems produced in our workshop, we developed a continuous plywood shell that transforms along its surface to create opposing acoustic conditions keyed to specific areas: at the back of the proscenium stage, the plywood shell splits and distorts to act as a diffuser; above the primary recording area at the center of the room, it undulates to refract high frequency sound. From the lobby, the plywood shell forms the exterior of the auditorium, providing a kind of internal “marquee” for the theater that wraps down to create the ceiling of the basement bar.
Within the relatively small volume of the former firehouse, a series of public and private spaces weave throughout the building and around the central sound space. An entrance lobby at the street opens down into a public cafe and bar amid the firehouse’s stone foundations below, where a new massive board formed concrete stair structure and carved buttresses resist the heavy vehicular loads from the street above. At the back of the recording studio are a “green room” for performers and an office for the owner and studio manager. Above the sound space, under the restored six foot deep structural timber roof trusses, we added a 2nd floor two-bedroom apartment and roof terrace. The curving birch plywood shells that snake through the building’s multiple levels function alternately as spatial dividers and light and sound reflectors, giving the interiors lightness and warmth to contrast the dark brick walls of the original building and providing architectural continuity and a transformed identity for the building.
Our client’s recent request to add bedrooms and spaces for more musicians presented a unique challenge. Lacking sufficient space in the existing building shell, the design team proposed a 650 square foot rooftop addition constructed from structural mass timber. Taking advantage of timber’s high strength to weight ratio and the possibility to fabricate large panels off-site in New Hampshire, the design team developed an innovative, prefabricated structural assembly anchored to the existing masonry building via a horizontal steel truss. Thanks to prefabrication and careful coordination, carpenters assembled the structural timber components on-site in less than 12 hours, reducing the addition’s overall construction time.
Completed in 2016, this is one of the first buildings in the United States to utilize cross-laminated timber throughout the building structure, featuring exposed structural timber in the interior spaces. Wood’s natural hygroscopic characteristics help regulate interior humidity and create acoustically live spaces for the musicians to practice between recording sessions.
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