S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium: The Hall Within the Hall

By Bekah Sandy

It’s been said that Benaroya Hall’s sound is its raison d’etre. But the story behind those acclaimed acoustics is explosive. Literally.  

Before the venue officially welcomed the orchestra for its inaugural performance, an 81-year-old visionary and his cannon took the stage first.  

The year was 1998, and the hall was still a construction site abuzz with workers applying its finishing touches. Darting amongst their ranks was the bespectacled octogenarian. For several hours, Cyril Harris ascended ladders and wiggled beneath seats, situating microphones throughout S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium. Thus prepared, “He walked up to that stage with this cannon — it was one of those starter gun cannons you use to start yacht races — and he fired it off,” said Andrew Clapham, the hall’s original construction project manager who witnessed firsthand the extreme methods Harris employed to ensure acoustical perfection.  

Clapham remembers the blast that roared through the auditorium and determined whether the community’s decades-long, $118-million-dollar investment in the Seattle Symphony’s future was a sound one. The recording gear situated strategically throughout measured the thunderous bang. “He recorded how long it took for that sound to reach all of these various points and how long it took for that sound to taper out.” 

Explosives were merely one of many memorable ways Harris achieved his exacting standards for the 2,500-seat theater. And every aspect of Taper Auditorium — from seats to wall paneling to carpeting to air vents — endured his meticulous scrutiny.  

Harris earned a reputation as a “stickler” for his previous work as acoustical engineer for such venues as New York’s Metropolitan Opera House and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. In this case, his dedication to excellence arose from the desire to provide the Seattle Symphony with a home — and an instrument — it deserved.  

“We built an instrument for the orchestra, so that their instruments could sound as good as possible,” Clapham said. “Everything about [Taper Auditorium] was designed so that the sound could travel and give the best sensation of what those instruments could achieve.” 

The paneling used in the auditorium is another example, the wood harvested from a single South African mahogany tree. Rather than using uniformly sized strips of lumber, Harris ordered them cut into smaller sections, each individually shaped, so that every portion resonated with a different frequency of sound. The reason? When sound waves emanating from the orchestra hit a panel, the wood’s unique dimensions naturally absorb some of them, but not all. By designing panels with such dimensions, Harris ensured that no one frequency of sound was being overdrawn from the overall performance.  

The same level of thoughtful design applied to the seats. Harris spent months testing how various cushion depths and fabrics affected acoustics before finally settling on the right combination. He and Clapham also invested countless hours assessing the seats’ positioning. “We wanted to maximize great views, while still making them comfortable so that you didn’t have to crane your neck for a good line of sight,” Clapham said. “But we also had to make sure that the layout of those seats didn’t absorb or reflect sound and give people sitting elsewhere a different listening experience. The whole idea was that no matter where you sit, the quality of sound is the same.”  

However, it was Taper Auditorium’s novel box-within-a-box design that earned the most buzz.  

Benaroya Hall’s location in the middle of downtown with busy city streets on all sides presented a singular challenge. Furthermore, the new concert hall was positioned directly over the Great Northern Tunnel, through which dozens of trains run daily. For all of Harris’s acoustical advancements to shine, this noisy onslaught needed to be countered.  

The solution was to build Taper Auditorium as a singular unit, a little spoon nestled against the overarching big spoon that is Benaroya Hall’s underground framework. Construction workers erected metal supports in the space atop the subterranean train tunnel, then poured concrete into a six-inch-thick slab that stretched nearly as long and wide as a football field. Atop that, they positioned 300-plus 15-square-inch rubber bearings, and atop those, they placed the 27-million-pound Taper Auditorium. The distinctive design was frequently described in stories as a cushion for the concert hall. The San Francisco Chronicle offered a near prophetic report on the new building’s “most unusual aspect”: “If you dropped [Taper] on the ground it might bounce.”  

It did pretty much exactly that during the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Afterwards, Taper Auditorium gently bounced for several hours while the much-researched rubber isolation bearings absorbed and disseminated the energy of the shock waves, which had registered at 3.6 on the Richter scale.  

Facilities Director Jeff Vaughan views Benaroya Hall’s 25th anniversary as motivation to maintain its legacy. “Even after two 40-city national tours as a sound engineer earlier in my career, Taper is the best sounding room I’ve ever been in,” he said. “Having started as the sound guy and sound mixer for [my school’s jazz band and drama club] when I was 16 years old, and now to be chief caretaker for Benaroya Hall, I feel as if I have arrived at the ultimate destination. I have won whatever the contest for an arts kid is, in terms of ‘making it.’” 

Vaughan recalled Harris’s “uncompromising” standards when the Facilities team evaluated the auditorium’s seats. “With 25 years of use, some originally installed components will begin to reach the end of their useful life,” Vaughan said. “Building components will wear out and need replacing.”  

When that happens, as it did with Taper’s seating, Vaughan ensures the work does not alter the room’s sound. Of course, as times change, so do the methods used. Rather than lugging a cannon on stage, Vaughan replicated Harris’ original vision by creating a mock seat with the intended fabric and foam and sent it to an acoustic lab for testing.  

But Vaughan aspires to do more than merely maintain Harris’s vision. He aims to expand upon it. Sometimes that means updating existing amenities. Sometimes that involves enhancements. And other times, that requires advancements unforeseen in the hall’s original designs. (Taper Auditorium has received various upgrades, like WiFi and fiber-optic cable installation. Additionally, in response to COVID-19, Vaughan oversaw the implementation of an air-handling system that scrubs the auditorium’s atmosphere clean using ionization.)  

Such efforts would please Harris. Looking around Taper Auditorium today, Clapham said he feels immense pride at how the legacy they launched has been honored. “She still sounds fantastic, and she looks great,” he said. “It was important to all of us that this iconic structure be the best it could be, and I think we were able to pull that off, and I think it continues to be the best.” 

Read the full history of Benaroya Hall here.