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Nestled against the backdrop of Montana’s Beartooth Mountains, Tippet Rise Art Center presents performances by internationally acclaimed musicians in their indoor and outdoor venues and exhibits large-scale outdoor sculptures by some of the world’s foremost artists and architects across its 12,500-acre of working ranchland, integrating the experience of art, music, and architecture with the natural environment. Beginning in 2011, Arup worked with Cathy and Peter Halstead, Tippet Rise founders, to help shape their vision for the art center and collaborate with them in bringing to life some of the art center’s most ambitious and innovative projects.
The Geode, Tippet Rise's latest commission from Arup, will be the art center’s most remote music venue yet: featuring a cluster of four acoustical shelters set in a natural bowl overlooking the mountains. The shelters will protect musicians and visitors from the sun and wind while still exposing them to the wild feeling of the surrounding environment. Officially opening in 2024, the venue will host pop-up concerts, inviting passing visitors that may be hiking or mountain biking.
To design the Geode, Arup brought together a team of specialist designers in acoustics, structural, façade, fire and wind engineering, lighting design, venue design, and sustainability. Each discipline contributed its own unique perspective to shape minimally intervening structures into the landscape. The resulting structures visual simplicity belies the complex geometric coordination and detailing of Arup’s multidisciplinary team.
A sheltering acoustical environment
The Geode’s form emerged ‘from the sound up,’ beginning with our client’s idea to create a ‘mouth’ and an ‘ear’ facing each other in the landscape and then evolved into a circle of four shelters. Unlike a conventional bandshell, which consists of a single shell projecting sound from the stage to the audience, the Geode’s four structures contain sound and reflect it in all directions, creating a more intimate and enveloping acoustical environment. It will also provide protection from the elements to the musicians and audience members.
Like the Tiara, Arup’s first outdoor music venue for Tippet Rise, the Geode creates a unified sound environment for musicians and the audience. Unlike the Tiara, however, the Geode’s sound-reflecting surfaces are larger and closer to the ground, resulting in a more grounded sound image with longer reverberation. The interior surface of the cladding boards is also burned and brushed using a traditional Japanese Yakisugi technique, creating furrows in the wood that scatter sound waves at high frequencies, resulting in a more mellow sound.
Balancing engineering, art, and nature
To conceptualize the Geode’s form, we developed a parametric model that combined structural form-finding, acoustical raytracing simulation, and dynamic shading analysis. We went through many iterations of the model to create the simple final shapes, gradually refining the parameters with input from all of our disciplines as well as feedback from our client.
To further enhance the design, we created a computer acoustic model to auralize different geometric variations and material options in the Arup SoundLab. This helped us refine the distance between the shells, the thickness of the cladding, and the degree of sound scattering from the cladding inner surface. We even raised the temperature within the SoundLab and added background noise recordings from the art center to simulate the site conditions in late summer as closely as possible.
“The Geode embodies our founder Ove Arup’s vision of ‘total design.’ By bringing together the diverse perspectives of acoustical, structural, façade, wind, fire and sustainability engineers, we arrived at an innovative, elegant acoustical form that sits lightly on the land in harmony with its wild surroundings. ”
Willem Boning Senior acoustics, audiovisual, and theatre consultant
A light touch on the land
To support Tippet Rise’s commitment to sustainability, Arup worked with the art center to identify a site that would not require any excavation or new road construction. Not only did our design minimally disturb the site, helping to preserve its delicate native grasses, it also significantly reduced the project’s potential carbon impact, which would have been significantly higher had excavation and a new road been required.
We also wanted to minimize disturbance to the ground under the structures themselves. Instead of pouring a continuous foundation, we took an approach that involved sitting the structures on top of 26 individual micropiles, thin tubes inserted into the ground and filled with a small volume of cement. Though cement has a high carbon cost, we were able to significantly reduce the required volume by using micropiles, compared to a more conventional foundation.
Throughout the construction process, we coordinated with the art center and the contractors to minimize the impact of construction equipment on the site. To mitigate site disturbance, we are preassembling steel components in the art center’s parking lot to avoid the need for cranes on the land, prohibiting forklifts that could rip up the ground, and pausing construction during the spring rainy season.
During the design process, Arup identified potential sustainability dilemmas and worked through them with sensitivity to the project’s unique site conditions. A key challenge we faced was weighing a desire to use lower-embodied carbon biomaterials against the need for durable materials, given the site’s exposure to weather extremes, including harsh winters, hot summers, and a growing risk of wildfire.
For the base structure, Arup decided to use steel over timber despite its upfront higher carbon cost, since steel wouldn’t need to be rebuilt in case of a fire. We also selected a weathering steel finish that will rust and darken naturally over time and would survive a wildfire without sustaining aesthetic damage.
For the timber cladding, Arup selected Douglas Fir, a softwood that was sourced from the nearby Pacific Northwest region. We specified a vertical grain cut pattern for both acoustical and sustainability reasons. Cutting a tree into vertical grain boards by quarter-sawing produces more waste than plain-sawing but yields a more dimensionally stable board that is less likely to warp when directly exposed to the elements, which will increasing the cladding’s overall lifespan.
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