Full-Circle Design

Imagine a professional violinist who plays to audiences at symphonies and concerts in some of the finest performance halls throughout the western U.S.Now consider that same individual, as a leading Seattlearchitect, charged with leveraging his performing experience to design one of the Northwest's finest music facilities built in the past several years.

Those two seemingly incongruent professions meshed recently when Eric Meng, partner at local architecture firm Studio Meng Strazzara, led the design effort for the $29 million New Music Education Facility at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wash. The 70,000-square-foot building, opened late last year, consolidates all the school's Department of Music facilities and provides a valuable tool for recruiting elite music education students from around the country.

"We sought to design a structure inspired by the music being produced at this school," said Meng, who spent the first 20 years of his life training to be a professional musician, only to discover a fondness for architecture early in his college career. "It was also crucial that we create a facility that maximized both space efficiency and sophisticated sound quality. It's without a doubt one of the best venues of its kind in the region today," he added.

The design approach for the facility was driven by Meng's long professional history with the school---his firm has provided design services for several other CWU buildings---and the countless meetings his team had with current and prospective music students and university professors to determine their specific needs.

An area called the "drum," a circular, center lobby and primary architectural statement for the facility, connects the building's rehearsal and performance halls and its classroom and administration wings. Encased by glass, the drum projects natural sunlight onto the lobby's interior in a constantly changing pattern, an architectural ode by Meng to the rhythm, movement and artistic expression of music itself.

The facility includes four rehearsal spaces designed to accommodate a wide range of ensembles, a 625-seat concert hall, a 150-seat recital hall, classrooms and administration offices, a composition laboratory, practice rooms, an acoustically isolated suite of percussion rooms and faculty studios.

The project's design team headed by Eric Meng also included Studio Meng Strazzara's Dennis Erwood, the principal in charge, and Steven Lee, who served as project manager. New Orleans-based Performance Architecture, Meng's associate architect on the project, contributed interior programming and design services of performance spaces, particularly in the rehearsal, concert and recital halls. BAI Austin provided acoustical consulting services for the New Music Education Building. Lydig Construction, Inc. served as general contractor.