Possible Dream
July 30, 2015
By Temple Ligon
In the late 1980s Columbia opened its Koger Center with a performance by the London Philharmonic. About the same time Greenville opened its new symphony hall, the Peace Center, and Charlotte showed its recently built concert hall complex, the Blumenthal, uptown.
In comparing performing arts facilities, a good guide is the cost per seat, sort of like comparing office buildings with the cost per square foot, which is how condominiums are compared.
That was almost 30 years ago, and inflation was at its historic lowest for the 30-year period. In other words, simply doubling the cost figures might do it to bring the comparisons current.
When reading the business page(s) in The State, it’s always a good idea to have a calculator handy to quickly come to a cost per square foot or per seat since the paper rarely says so.
The Koger Center came in at about $7,000 per seat, the Peace Center at $15,000 per seat, and the Blumenthal at $20,000. Today that would today come to $14,000, Koger; $30,000, Peace; and $40,000, Blumenthal.
Each facility is the pride of the city. But when comparing similar facilities around the world, some are seen as the pride of the nation, not just pride of the city. Take the Sydney Opera House, for instance, a familiar form worldwide.
This past January the new concert hall in Paris opened prematurely, according to the architect Jean Nouvel. He complained that the building was not ready, but the French leadership complained they weren’t about to slow down the opening for what might appear to be the effects of a terrorism attack on a humor magazine.
The Philharmonie de Paris opened with great fanfare and great acoustics acclaim this past January, two years late and three times original budget. It’s located northeast of the center of the city as part of Cite de la Musique (Music City), which is nestled inside the Parc de la Villette, part of the comparatively deprived 19th arrondisement.
The total tab for Nouvel’s concert complex is a bit more than $500 million, or $200,000 per concert hall seat, ten times what Charlotte’s Blumenthal would cost today. Also included in the total tab were exhibition space, two restaurants, six rehearsal rooms and education studios.
The orchestra in the Philharmie de Paris has a stage placement in the center of the building, immersing the spectators, something akin to how the Disney has worked in Los Angeles since it opened ten years ago and how the Berlin Philharmonic has played since 1963. Point being, the orchestra’s central placement surrounded by seats is an old idea, but a building plan not fully appreciated until the past ten years.
Most performing arts halls are multi-purpose jobs suitable for symphony as well as legitimate theater, opera, rock and world music. But the multi-purpose accommodation doesn’t really accommodate any one purpose very well. Hence, separate facilities for opera, symphony, theater, film and chamber music were built at Lincoln Center and at Washington’s Kennedy Center. Expensive, sure, but it’s all part of the definition of a great city.
The world’s greatest city, New York, is getting serious, finally, about acoustics in Avery Fisher Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic – until 1962 at home in Carnegie Hall. In 1973, Avery Fisher, gave $10.5 million to upgrade the acoustics and to earn the naming rights. Philip Johnson was the architect of the upgrade and Cyril Harris sold his expertise in acoustics.
Still didn’t work.
Now a new Avery Fisher Hall is in the works, and this time it sounds like a realistic budget, $500 million for the renovation. That’s $200,000 per seat for a renovation. Hell, a new concert hall probably wouldn’t cost that much, unless, of course, the Parisians got involved.
The seed money, the first respectable contribution on the road to a half-billion dollars to give Avery Fisher Hall top-flight acoustics, is coming from Hollywood’s David Geffen, the money man who sold Jasper Johns’s False Start several years ago for $80 million, a record for a living painter.
Geffen is contributing $100 million, and for that he gets the building named for him. Now, there’s that remaining $400 million to worry about, but this is, after all, New York _______ City.
Los Angeles is our country’s second city, and Geffen has already given the U. C. L. A. School of Medicine $200 million, changing the name to the David Geffen School of Medicine. If that kind of thing can happen in our second city, the world’s greatest city should be expected to manage even more.
Geffen is not moving to Columbia, not anytime soon, anyway. Columbia, a government town, will have to get stunningly creative to edge towards a world-class city status. Don’t even think about the idea of the biggest or the tallest or the richest. Never happen here.
But Columbia can be included among the most distinguished, or the most creative, or the most interesting, or the most unusual.
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