The first vineyard concert hall in North America

Abstract

The first vineyard or surround concert hall designed and built in the Western Hemisphere is the Sala Nezahualcoyotl in Mexico City. The Hall was completed in 1976 and is part of the Cultural Center at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. The hall was named after a Toltec poet, architect, and musician who lived in the 15th century and was the Renaissance man of his day. In order to provide the familiar traditional sound of the rectangular (shoebox) European Hall, the acoustic designers set the criteria for reverberation times through the frequency spectrum and the Initial Time Delay Gap at every seat in the house to match the measurements taken at the Grosser Musik vereinssaal in Vienna and Boston Symphony Hall. In this paper we discuss the techniques used to create the traditional sound in a vineyard hall and the reaction of musicians and audiences to the completed facility. The Sala was the model for Suntory Hall in Japan which in turn spawned a number of vineyard halls in Japan. Most recently, the vineyard style seems to be appealing to more and more symphonic organizations in Europe and North America.