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The August Wilson African American Cultural Center is one of the largest, multi-disciplinary arts centers in the country, focused exclusively on the African American experience. When the community was looking to create this beautiful theater, Oeler Industries, Inc. was able to step in and help bring the architect’s vision to life, while meeting all the acoustic specifications of the independent acoustical consultant.
When an independent acoustical consultant is brought into a project, they typically hand off their design to the architect, who is in charge of choosing finishes. On this particular project, they chose green and purple fabric in a diagonally-joined fashion. To meet the acoustic requirements, some of the acoustical elements used in this project include barrel-shaped diffusers placed on an 8” deep wall.
“When you have a barrel-shaped diffuser that’s mounted to a wall, and you want to mount fabric across the face of it, and you have a diagonal joint in the fabric, there’s nothing to attach the fabric too,” said Matt Oeler, our president and founder.
“Let’s say you’re building a car. We have an engine and driveline and we have the body of the car – with absolutely no detail with how those things are held together with the frame of the car. So Turner Construction brought us in to do that. It’s really one of the great values that we bring to the table… If we are in the game as a part of the team during the design phase, we can avoid designing things that are impossible to build.”
When a fabric face is floating freely with no core behind it, something has to be done to prevent people from falling through it. “We came up with a method,” Oeler recalled. “We built [the cutouts of the wall] with fire-rated MDF, then we had custom-made galvanized steel hat channels made. But we can’t staple our track to hat channel, so we did an infill of MDF and attached the track to that. It sat just deep enough. These flanges were designed to receive a perforated steel sheet so the sound could go in and out, but you couldn’t fall through them. So, now, we have some durability built into it.”
“We got them precisely what they wanted, and there was no one else that could have done it.”
Matt Oeler, President and Founder
Since the theater is curved, the fabric was essentially used as a floating false wall. All the absorption, barrel diffusers, and hard panels, in addition to lighting and electrical elements, were able to be tucked in behind the fabric façade.
While it may have been a bit of a rocky road to solve the communication gap and create a solution to make every stakeholder feel heard, the solution speaks for itself.
Oeler continued: “The acoustics in the space are fantastic. The fit and finish is top-notch. All that work, time, effort, planning, custom-building, and everything that went into making that wall 8” deep with varying acoustical components behind the fabric, with these custom-made flybridges to carry the joint in the fabric…
We got them precisely what they wanted, and there was no one else that could have done it.
We’ve done a lot of theaters. Every theater has different, quirky issues, but this one was particularly challenging. It’s these kinds of projects that are intriguing and satisfying, even though when the average person looks around the space, they see purple and green fabric on the walls and don’t think anything of it. But when you look at how this room was constructed, it was constructed like a giant musical instrument. This is like the Stradivarius of theaters. There are things hidden in the walls here that patrons can appreciate no matter where they are sitting. There are no bad seats. Everyone in that room can hear everything on that stage. It’s not because of the PA or the speaker on the stage, it’s the room. The people that built that space cared enough to make sure that the theater served the purpose it was designed for: communicating the message on the stage to the people in the seats. If you don’t pay attention to the acoustics of that space, you might as well not build it.”
Oeler Industries, Inc. can speak the language of the acoustical consultant and the language of the architect. To celebrate that fact, we are proud to share that Oeler Industries, Inc. is the official Future of Architecture sponsor of Design Pittsburgh 2025—which is hosted at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. For more information and tickets to this AIA Pittsburgh flagship event, click here.