Teatro Escama
An opera house refit. A ceiling of 1,140 timber scales replaced the plaster dome and ended a century of dead seats under the balcony.
- Seats
- 1,480
- Ceiling scales
- 1,140
- Reverberation
- 1.6 s
- Reopened
- 2025
The old dome focused sound on row twelve and starved everything behind it. Singers knew which seats to give their families and which to avoid.
The new ceiling is a field of scales, each tilted by hand to send a slice of the stage to a different row. We mapped the theatre seat by seat before the refit and again after. The quietest seat in the house is now within three decibels of the loudest.
The figure of this room
Sand on a plate shaken at 1105 Hz comes to rest along the lines where nothing moves. Every room we design has a pattern like this at each bass note. Drag the frequency to see how quickly it changes.
A simulation of an ideal square plate, shown as an illustration. It is not a measurement of the finished room.