MacPhail’s form harmonizes with function

Unlike its longtime home on LaSalle Avenue, the new MacPhail Center for Music under construction near Minneapolis' riverfront probably never will be mistaken for a department store or office building.

Just outside the main entrance, overhead speakers can pipe music from inside the building out into the surrounding neighborhood. An outdoor plaza has a curved brick wall to serve as a backdrop for performances.

Huge windows in ground-floor classrooms and a floor-to-ceiling window in the two-story concert hall will give passersby a glimpse of classes, rehearsals and concerts.

The $25 million building on the corner of 5th Avenue and S. 2nd Street is the latest cultural institution for the Mill District, joining the Guthrie Theater, which opened in 2006, and the Mill City Museum, which opened in 2003.

"It's a community space we've never quite had before," said David O'Fallon, MacPhail president. With 165 teachers, it's second only to the Minnesota Orchestra as an employer of musicians in the state.

MacPhail's graduates include Lawrence Welk. The current downtown building serves about 3,500 students a week, but O'Fallon said that the number likely will increase when the new center opens in January. The 55,000-square-foot building is about 10,000 square feet larger than the existing facilities.

More important than the increased space, the new building was designed and is being constructed specifically as a center for music education and performance. It's a big change from the building at 1128 LaSalle Av. S. MacPhail has occupied for 85 years, where the original owners weren't sure a music school would succeed and constructed a building that could be converted to other uses, O'Fallon said.

As a result, the old building has plenty of shortcomings, including no central air conditioning or humidity control for properly maintaining the pitch of pianos, harps and other instruments. The acoustics are so poor that performances in the cramped fourth-floor concert hall must compete with the roar of city buses on streets below.

MacPhail hired Mortenson Construction in 2001 to build the new center, partly because of the Minneapolis firm's experience working with nonprofit organizations but also because it had built other performance venues. Those include Walt Disney Concert Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the recent addition to the Walker Art Center. It currently is building the Twin Cities' two major sports projects, the Twins ballpark and the University of Minnesota football stadium. Its local sports and performance-related projects include Target Center and Xcel Energy Center.

Tom Schmall, Mortenson director of project development, said MacPhail's acoustical considerations required creating a computerized three-dimensional model from the original building plans by Minneapolis architecture firm James Dayton Design. The modeling was necessary to coordinate heating, ventilation, air conditioning, humidity control and electrical systems with walls, ceilings and floors all specially designed for a building with complex acoustical needs.

The 3-D modeling was especially useful for the 225-seat performance hall, where electrical and mechanical systems in the ceiling had to be installed in a way that could accommodate a second ceiling of acoustical panels in a variety of shapes, Schmall said. The ceiling panels, as well as Douglas fir wall panels installed at different angles, are designed to "move the sound around" the two-story room, he said.

Schmall said MacPhail's new building will have 42 different types of walls, compared with about a dozen found in an office building. Some are as thick as 16 inches and require precise layering of sheetrock, insulation and air space. Windows are double-pane, with each pane in a given window a different thickness and separated by several inches of air space.

"Different frequencies equate to different solutions," Schmall said. His firm brought in Minneapolis-based Acoustic Dimension as a consultant. Rooms for pianists have different needs than those for percussionists.

Each of the 56 practice studios is equipped with a 500-pound door lifted into place and installed with special equipment, he said. The door on the "rock-jazz-percussion performance lab" on the sixth-floor is even more massive.

The goal is to allow some sound to be filter out into common areas while minimizing what's let in.

"We don't want 100 percent sound isolation," O'Fallon said. The aim is to give life to the entire building, so people walking down corridors can hear some of what's going on, while maximizing sound quality for students and performers, he said.

Susan Feyder • 612-673-1723

Susan Feyder • sfeyder@startribune.com