Russell Johnson: The Bolt Beranek and Newman years.

Abstract

In 1954, the author and Russell Johnson both joined the architectural acoustics staff of the pioneering research and consulting firm, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), in Cambridge, MA. Just over 16 years later, in 1970, after exposure to some of the brightest talents in the relatively new discipline of applied acoustics, both left BBN to form their own independent consulting firms: Cavanaugh, a general consulting practice, and Johnson, which was to become an internationally renowned firm, providing comprehensive services on all phases of performance facility design including acoustics. In the mid-1990s, the author began the process of nominating his long time friend and colleague for the Acoustical Society’s prestigious Wallace Clement Sabine Medal which was awarded in 1997 with the citation “for contributions to the understanding of the acoustics of performance spaces and the design of concert halls, theaters and opera houses throughout the world.” This paper traces Russell Johnson’s developing performance facility design interests from his early pre-WWII days, his US Army wartime service, his postwar studies at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), and at Yale as well as his “extended” initial committment of two years at BBN to learn all he could about performance space acoustics.