MacPhail School of Music Antonello Hall

Overview

This 58,000-SF facility is the new home of a cultural institution with a 100-year history of serving the greater Minneapolis community. Featuring a 200-seat flexible performance space (Antonello Hall) and superior acoustical environments for instruction studios and early childhood development classrooms, the Center also includes school offices, a cafe, an outdoor performance courtyard, and a large lobby that doubles as a secondary performance space.

The team engaged in an interactive process to prioritize program goals, assessing comparable music schools, performance and instructional spaces, and higher education music programs before establishing quantitative design criteria.

One challenge within Antonello Hall was accommodation for a reflective glass upstage wall. Both Antonello Hall and rehearsal rooms are acoustically flexible to support a wide variety of music genres via retractable velour curtains that allow control of reverberation.

Instructional spaces required a high level of sound isolation. “Room within a room” construction minimizes sound transfer to enable concurrent use of adjacent spaces.