Atlas Performing Arts Center, Washington, DC
Client: Atlas Performing Arts Center
The Atlas is home to adventurous audiences, artists and ideas alike – presenting contemporary performances in music, theatre, dance, film, spoken word and performance art unlike anywhere in the city. The Atlas is on the National Register of Historic Places and was the proud recipient of the 2012 Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in Service to the Arts. In 2001, Jane Lang, a philanthropist and lawyer, began discussing the renovation of the Atlas with its H-Street neighbors to determine the best possible use for the space. The group decided that the theater and several storefronts would become a community-based performing arts venue that would serve the blighted community. Spurred by Lang’s vision, the Washington, DC government adopted a plan in 2003 to rebuild the H Street, NE corridor and identified the Atlas as a cornerstone of revitalization.
The Atlas fully re-opened in 2006 as a 59,000 square-foot performing arts center with four performance spaces, dance studios, offices, back-of-house facilities and an expansive lobby with a café. Due to the historic nature of the building and structural constraints some of the existing partitions remained and some of the noise control elements were overlooked in the less prominent flexible and black box theatres known as Lab I & II and sound transmission from the dance studios.
Bay Acoustics provided extensive acoustical testing and modelling to provide recommendations for sound isolation and flanking issues. We oversaw a major renovation to Lab I & II greatly improving the sound isolation of these spaces.