Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City opens this month

Theatre Projects, in collaboration with architect Moshe Safdie and acoustician Nagata Acoustics, designed and planned the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, opening this month in Kansas City, Mo.
Theatre Projects played the lead role in theatre design and planning as well as in engineering the customized theatre equipment. BNIM in Kansas City served as the executive architect.
The 285,000-sf Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts is a world-class arts space featuring two distinct performance spaces that will serve as home to the Kansas City Ballet, Kansas City Symphony, and Lyric Opera of Kansas City. 
The 1,800 seat Kauffman Theatre, a proscenium theatre for opera and dance, draws inspiration from the great opera houses of Europe. Balconies wrap around the auditorium to create ideal proximity and sight lines for the audience, and the space gives the audience the sense of an intimate performance.
In an effort to give the audience the kind of engaging and interactive experience only a smaller, more intimate space can offer, Theatre Projects’ concept design for the Kauffman Theatre incorporated multiple balconies and side boxes of seating, which bring more people closer to the stage and wrap the room with live energy.
The 1,600 seat Helzberg Hall, designed for symphonic music, deploys another successful form, only recently rediscovered: the vineyard concert hall, an arena-type space that places the musicians in the very heart of the room with the audience seating in terraces (reminiscent of a vineyard) encircling the concert platform. The sedate wood tone and fluid shape of the concert hall give the impression of a curved musical instrument and follows the exterior shape of the building. Theatre Projects provided flexibility with the design of a six-lift system to easily transform the concert platform into numerous performance configurations, depending on the center’s artistic needs.