Totally Wired

EMPAC

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Amber S. Clark, January 29, 2009

Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute’s neck-breakingly massive EMPAC building looms out of the November mist like the gleaming, glass-walled craft of some far-flung future planet. Visible through the imposing edifice’s high windows is the curvaceous, wood-skinned hull of the 1,200-seat concert hall.

Inside the 220,000-square-foot, $200 million complex the sci-fi sensations continue. In one of the two cubelike studio spaces, both of which are reconfigurable as traditional black-box theaters or “clean” installation sites, a team of students and producer-engineers have set up a remotely linked recording console to capture the music of a chamber group in the neighboring hall. Above the blinking lights of the mixing board and a few nice-touch lava lamps, a large four-way-split video screen displays the musicians from different angles. In a distant corner of the building is its remaining performance environment, a 400-capacity secondary theater, which is abuzz with a crew positioning programmable lighting rigs and setting up for another event’s rehearsal. All four main spaces are lined with custom-made, dimpled convex and concave acoustical panels that further accent the structure’s space-station ambience. It’s utterly inescapable, the sense that one has crossed over into whatever impossibly advanced world it is that birthed this mammoth mothership.

Actually, it was the Troy college’s directors and British architectural firm Grimshaw—plus a generous anonymous donor—who conceived the futuristic center, which, when it comes to being a bespoke incubator of truly cutting-edge performing arts, is quite literally a world all its own. In fact, for the site’s featured artists and their audiences one could say that EMPAC (an acronym for Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) represents a far better creative world than the earthly one they leave on the other side of the portal. This completely wired facility was designed from inception to completion to be the most acoustically perfect and infinitely adaptable facility of its kind, “a place and program where the arts, science, and technology will challenge and transform each other,” according to EMPAC’s promotional material.

“[EMPAC] is totally unique, there is no other place like it,” says German-born Johannes Goebel, who is the center’s director as well as a composer with architectural experience. Within the walls are miles and miles of fiber-optic cables linking all of the spaces and allowing the transmission of the highest-definition audio and video signals and data from one area to the next; additionally, any or all of the spaces and all of the equipment in each of them can be controlled from a single computer. And the acoustics and sightlines in each self-contained venue are beyond flawless.