A Tour Through the Auditorium

The Foyer

‘UKARIA has stories within its walls – a rapidly accumulating record of humanity and beauty from the concerts held within. Ulrike and all those who have helped create this shrine to music recognise the rewards of investment not only in the bricks-and-mortar of the venue but also in the musicians and artists who enliven it.’

– Iain Grandage

Every aspect of the foyer has been designed to create a sense of invitation. Rammed earth walls are bathed in natural light – preluding the events inside the hall – whilst environmentally sustainable timbers exude natural, rural warmth.

‘I don’t think I’ve met anybody who doesn’t like rammed earth,’ architect Anton Johnson says. ‘It’s such an earthy, grounded material.’ Made from locally quarried sand and rubble, the walls are a nod to the old mudbrick building from the Jurlique Herb Farm days, whilst offering a distinctly contemporary feeling of stability.

Blackbutt timber from Queensland is used for the floors throughout the foyer and auditorium for its unique density. ‘It’s one-and-a-half times harder than jarrah, so it can withstand a lot of traffic and wear, and it has a beautiful blonde colour,’ Anton explains. Overhead, a hemlock acoustic ceiling absorbs a significant amount of noise during periods of congestion, and complements the simplicity of the wall and floor surfaces.

The doors to the auditorium are made of yellow cedar from Alaska – a timber chosen for its colour, durability and fine-grained finish. ‘It’s the solid timber that gives the whole place a bit of a glow,’ Anton says. ‘It’s difficult to get and rarely seen, because it has very distinctive qualities in terms of the smoothness of the surface and the lustre that it gives. It is also a popular timber for making classical guitars.’ Andrew Steiner’s Ode to Nature, crafted from beautiful Tasmanian Huon pine, is displayed amid fresh flower arrangements that are handpicked from the UKARIA garden. The foyer also functions as an exhibition space for contemporary Indigenous art: Ginger Wikilyiri and Keith Stevens’ magnificent work Piltati (2011) – generously on loan from the Art Gallery of South Australia – is the current centrepiece of the foyer. An abbreviated history of the cultural program also adorns the walls, with posters of internationally renowned musicians documenting some of the highlights – all individually signed by the artists as a permanent souvenir of their time at this special place.

The Wave Wall

As you enter the concert hall and turn left, you find yourself on the other side of the rammed earth wall. The undulating, wave-like contour may appear like a neat aesthetic feature, but nothing about this curve is random.

‘I was very conscious of the fact that big long flat surfaces are a problem for acoustics,’ Anton recalls. ‘At first I had this wall stepped, but Cameron Hough [Acoustic Engineer, ARUP] didn’t like this option for diffusion at this low level.’

Several alternative options, including the use of an irregular timber batten screen in front of the wall, and the idea of casting a diffusion profile directly into the rammed earth, were explored. When Anton finally landed on the idea of a wave, Cameron immediately gave it the tick of approval.

‘He ran it through his system, and he actually profiled the wall,’ Anton explains. ‘He sent me an AutoCAD file that I could translate into my drawings so the construction team could build his formwork, and get it right, because you couldn’t leave it up to anyone else! And of course they loved it!’ The resulting design provides a very even spatial coverage and is an effective scattering surface above 1 kHz – a perfect example, if ever there was one, of that elusive balance between architecture and aesthetics, form and function.

The Glass Wall

‘UKARIA’s magical listening space invites us into landscape – the ancient Peramangk Country of the exterior, and the interior of a room designed for contemplation and dreaming.’

– Genevieve Lacey In much the same way that a landscape is never the same twice, a piece of live music is illuminated in new and unpredictable ways as it interacts with the environment in which it is heard. At UKARIA, light, landscape and the seasonal rhythms of nature become participants in the creation of art, providing an ever-changing canvas upon which our musicians paint masterpieces in sound.

The main feature of the design that sets UKARIA apart from almost any other venue in Australia is its ninemetre wide, four-metre high doubleglazed glass wall behind the stage. Precisely orientated by the sight lines to the Mount Barker Summit and its neighbouring Twin Peaks, the view is like something out of a Hans Heysen painting: birds glide between swaying eucalypts all year round, while the uniquely Australian landscape shifts between the golden straw colours of high summer to the rich, green hues of winter. To the southeast, blade walls of rammed earth frame views of the neighbouring Ngeringa Vineyards, heightening the sense of immersion and interaction with the rural setting. The transience of the music itself converses with the shifting, fugitive qualities of nature, creating gorgeous moments of serendipity: a silvery mist might blanket the hillside as the music passes from major to minor; a rainbow might appear as the final cadence fills the hall. On rare occasions, a shooting star may even be glimpsed on a clear night.

Even during the daylight hours, a translucent black shade can be deployed at the push of a button to minimise morning glare without compromising the views. The concert hall can also be transformed from an open space flooded with natural light to a black box with a drop-down projection screen, suitable for audiovisual presentations. For jazz or cabaret nights, a 180-degree curtain wraps around the stage, heightening the sense of envelopment and intimacy whilst also absorbing some of the amplified sound.

The Keyboard Walls

The two control-room walls above the lower gallery proved a significant challenge for the design. ‘We were fundamentally dealing with a circular shape, and domes are terrible when it comes to focusing sound,’ Anton explains. ‘But it doesn’t mean you can’t use a dome, it just means you’ve got to deal with the problem. So we looked at how we might stop the sound misbehaving off those walls, and out of that we developed the idea of the keyboard walls, and because we had to really work at it, they probably came out better.’

In a conference paper for the Australian Acoustical Society, Cameron writes that the scattering profile ‘consisted of a quasi-random sequence of four different “blocks” separated by constant-width spacers, each with a different depth groove (60 mm / 45 mm / 20 mm / 10 mm) routed into the block.’

Like the doors between the concert hall and foyer, Alaskan yellow cedar was used for the ‘white key’ battens. ‘Because these walls have so much articulation in the design, it would have been too busy visually to use a timber that was full of grain, so I wanted something that was really serene and quiet to complement all the detail in the diffusion,’ Anton explains. Layered on top of the ‘white keys’ are South Australian red gum highlights grouped in twos and threes (corresponding to the pattern of the black keys on a piano keyboard), rising and falling in a contour that traces the profile of the Mount Barker Summit.

The Seating

‘There is something magical about UKARIA. Built with exquisite attention to detail, it actively encourages the deep, reciprocal relationship of player to listener. The audience is never far from the performers; the formality of a traditional concert hall is supplanted by a sense of community, a place for music lovers.’

– Paul Grabowsky AO

Custom-built by leading Adelaidebased engineering company Acromat, the retractable seating is what makes UKARIA so readily adaptable to a variety of different functions. A total of 220 people can be seated in the theatre-style setup, which can be completely retracted to accommodate a bespoke board meeting setting, with long tables assembled on a flat floor for celebrations, corporate lunches or networking events. This flexibility also permits an even greater intimacy for jazz concerts, where the audience can sit behind round tables in cabaret style enjoying meals and refreshments as they listen.

‘This was the first time Acromat had ever manufactured curved retractable seating, and it was very complicated,’ Anton explains. ‘It was made here in Adelaide: Craig Otto [Managing Director, Acromat] is a genius when it comes to engineering! Of course I had to design the space for them to disappear into.

Photo: Randy Larcombe

I was immensely pleased with the final result. A lot of people don’t even realise the seats are retractable, and it’s impressive when you see the difference between the seating in place and the flat floor.’

The lower seating gallery consists of four terraced rows (C–F), each comprised of 21–26 seats. An additional two rows (A–B) of 20–22 loose seats are often assembled on the stage itself. These seats can be quickly removed and stowed in the large storage area to the left of the auditorium when not in use, while the seats in rows C–F above fold flat as a block and can be tucked away underneath the floor of the upper gallery, out of sight behind a wooden concertina. Along the sides of the lower gallery are artful metal balustrades that once again are inspired by the design of a piano keyboard.

After the initial idea of a designated area for visual art was abandoned, an additional 81 seats were added on the upper level, comprised of another four terraced, retractable rows of 13–14 seats (H–L), with an additional 28 single seats placed directly behind the glass balustrade. Clad in beautiful aubergine-toned upholstery, the material was specifically chosen to provide an optimal balance between the relationship between the rehearsal sound (without an audience) and the performance sound (at full capacity).

‘The human body absorbs a lot of sound, so if you’ve got an empty space, and you rehearse in that, and then you bring in 200 people, it’s going to go dry,’ Anton explains. ‘Traditionally concert halls have timber floors, and Cameron was keen on this for a long time. But that’s one thing I had learnt in the auditorium I designed in South Africa – I was complemented on the fact that the rehearsal sound matched the performance sound very closely. They key was upholstered seating and, in my view (which turned out to be right), carpet on the floor. The audience tend to block out most of the upholstery once they’re seated. Their legs hang down; they put their coats on the floor, and so on. And I hated the idea of someone dropping a hard object and it rolling down the stepped floor – especially in such an intimate space, where you can hear a pin drop. The carpet helps enormously to soften any noises from the audience.’

The Glass Balustrade

The idea for a glass balustrade separating the upper and lower galleries originated as a practical safety requirement. Even after the original concept of the rear art gallery was abandoned, it remained unchanged in the design.

‘When Cameron started doing his analysis it appeared that it didn’t affect the acoustics,’ Anton says. ‘We could have used a metal balustrade and the sound would have gone straight through, but it would have had a stronger feeling of division in the space. So once he had done all his testing he gave it the green light, which I was very pleased to hear, because it was definitely my preferred design.’ The most beautiful advantage of the glass balustrade was discovered only after the concert hall was built: at different times of the day, it acts as a kind of CinemaScope reflection of the landscape, allowing the musicians to see (and feel) the presence of the natural world as they perform.

‘I had not anticipated that panorama!’ Anton says. ‘When those things happen, I believe they don’t just happen randomly – they happen because of the intensity

Photo: Randy Larcombe

of care put into the design, especially the geometry, and the relationship between the audience and the ensemble. The reflection of the landscape for the musicians was a lovely coincidence!’

The Upper Walls

The upper walls of the auditorium simulate the effect of being in a much larger concert hall. Comprised of two stepped bulkheads of hoop pine plywood, these walls create a sense of ‘3D immersion’ by dramatically improving lateral reflections.

‘The introduction of the stepping in the bulkheads was there in my original concept, but it wasn’t taken to the level of sophistication you now see – the fine tuning of the actual depths was done following the advice from Cameron,’ Anton says.

‘Initial listening tests (via an auralisation demonstration in ARUP’s SoundLab) indicated that the room’s spatial impression was subjectively very frontal, with little source broadening or immersion,’ Cameron explains. ‘Additional reflection paths were incorporated via a series of stepped bulkheads added to the side walls, in effect creating a series of soffits with varying height (and hence reflection delay) to act as second order reflecting surfaces. The soffit diffusion design was also intended to maximise the horizontal diffusion to improve reflection coverage over a wider area, as well as to disperse potential echoes away from the source position.’ Underneath each ‘bulkhead’, battens of yellow cedar rise and fall in a series of wave-like ‘steps’ based on the Fibonacci number sequence. Additional bulkheads were also added on the rear walls behind the audience to provide further improvements to the spaciousness of the auditorium.

The Reciprocal Frame

Since the dawn of time, humanity has intuitively understood that beautiful architecture is an inherently necessary component of all ritualised experiences. Beauty actively encourages and inculcates a state of reverence and wonder, something the architects of the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras understood better than anybody. Awe-inspiring cathedrals with steeples ascending into the heavens were erected as places of worship; their ceilings adorned with astonishing fresco paintings that defied the laws of physics.

A classical music concert is, in its own way, a similar form of ritual, albeit with its own set of internalised codes and conventions. Musicians wear tails or concert blacks, striding on stage to the applause of an audience who thereafter sits quietly and motionless for a considerable duration of time. The spirit of a higher being (the composer) is invoked by the sound of instruments playing melody and harmony and rhythm in highly specified, meticulous ways, with the aim of generating a kind of emotional and spiritual nexus between composer, performer and audience. Indeed, the greatest concerts are often said to represent a kind of quasinuminous, transcendental experience.

On a much more intimate scale, the UKARIA roof has a similar function: it

embodies awe and humility, energy and balance in a visually dynamic structure that employs the ancient engineering principles of the reciprocal frame – a primitive structure used in Japan, China, the Philippines and India for building huts and houses as early as the twelfth century.

‘I’ve always had a soft spot for the reciprocal frame,’ Anton admits. ‘Starting out with the idea of a circle, that sense of togetherness, the fact that it had a dynamic quality about it … it was clear from the outset that the reciprocal frame was very applicable to this space. It has this unbelievable sense of rhythm and movement, and it’s completely self-supporting.’

‘The way it works is that each beam rests on top of the next beam: in the simplest way, you put a pin through the two so that they can’t separate, and then the next one is on top of the previous one, and so you go round

Photo: Randy Larcombe

until eventually you come back to the beginning and the very last one is underneath the first one. Every beam is supported by another beam, so the force just keeps going round and round, and it’s completely stable. It also puts no outward force onto the walls – it just sits lightly on the top. It could almost levitate!’

Twelve oregon and steel composite beams interlock at the crown, spiralling around a central oculus (traditionally a smoke hole in the ancient designs) to allow additional natural light in through the roof. Once the frame was in place, secondary structural members were added to support the ceiling. ‘They all respond to the spiral effect of the roof, so I just took those natural force lines and joined the members up and then gradually broke it down into smaller segments,’ Anton explains.

Spanning each of the twelve primary beams are sixteen smaller triangular hoop pine panels – stained to tone down the contrast with the oregon beams – within a ‘honeycomb’ type tracery of dividers. ‘The architectural desire was for the panels to be generally “shallower” at the centre of the room so that the dividers between the cells were more prominent at the sides of the room and reduced towards the centre; giving an effect similar to the tracery of vaulting in Medieval architecture,’ Cameron writes. Each panel is fixed at a different depth to provide scattering based on an inverted Fibonacci sequence. ‘The scattering design broadens the reflection pattern from the ceiling to reduce the strength of focusing as well as avoiding the “back-scatter” that would occur at high frequencies from a ceiling with no infill panels,’ Cameron explains.

‘You don’t really see it, but the panels are all at different depths,’ Anton says. ‘We’re only talking millimetres. But it’s those millimetres that are so important. I think it works so well because when people walk in, their eyes go up to the ceiling, and they say “Ohhh!” How often does that happen in buildings? Even when you’re listening to music, you know you’ve got this shelter over your head. You can hear the sound coming back from the ceiling.’

‘Cathedrals have religious connotations for a lot of people,’ Ulrike says. ‘There’s a sacredness [to the UKARIA roof], and that’s part of the height as well – it’s like a clearing, an opening. At one stage I thought: this actually is like a cathedral for music!’

The Greenroom

A self-contained studio and greenroom adjacent to the auditorium provides artists with a convenient retreat location, featuring a kitchen and dining area, an upright piano, a communal lounge room, bathroom, shower and laundry facilities, and even a day bed to recharge before a concert.

The Alfresco

A kind of outdoor foyer that embraces the landscape, the alfresco area replaced the old mud-brick building as the communal space for afternoon tea during the intervals. It also serves as a dining space for sit-down lunches and dinners during weekend festivals such as UKARIA 24 and Chamber Landscapes in the Adelaide Festival. A fully equipped kitchen designed by Stoddart provides our hospitality team with everything they need to cater for up to 126 people.

Like the auditorium, the materials used in the alfresco were chosen specifically for their sustainable qualities and rural character. The bar is framed externally with red gum and corrugated iron. The Harlequin granite for the bench top of the bar was sourced from Wallaroo in the Yorke Peninsula: Anton Johnson and Gustav Meincke went down to a stone mason’s yard and hand picked the slabs. ‘It’s a fantastic granite,’ Anton says. ‘For me it just talks about the land!’ ‘It’s a gathering space,’ Ulrike says. ‘Of course music will always be at the heart, but it gives us the ability to have other community gatherings as well. The significance of place, and the role of the garden, is continually evolving, becoming more and more important than ever before. It adds another dimension to that original vision: to create a Cultural Centre.’