Akustiks

Akustiks is an acoustics consultancy headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, working on architectural acoustics, audio and audiovisual systems design, room acoustics and noise control. Its clients are symphony orchestras, opera and dance companies, drama theaters, museums and schools of music, and its principals each bring between 30 and 50 years of practice. The firm’s best-known project is David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, home of the New York Philharmonic. It also works through an affiliate practice in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Akustiks is the acoustician on the $13 million Palladium Theater renovation in St. Petersburg, Florida, where a new opera-house-proportioned ceiling and acoustic shutters are meant to let one room handle both amplified and unamplified programming.

The practice divides its work into five engagement types, and the distinction matters when a client is deciding how early to bring an acoustician onto a job. New facilities is the fullest scope: acoustic goals are set at the outset, and the building’s architecture, structure and mechanical systems are then detailed against them, with working sessions in the completed room to tune it. Audio and video covers sound, video and production communication systems, coordinated with the electrical, structural and HVAC engineers so the building can carry the loads those systems impose. Renovation work runs from restoring historic fabric to threading new systems through an existing shell. Adaptive reuse starts earlier still, with a survey of a city or institution’s existing building stock to find candidates suited to becoming concert halls or museums. Feasibility studies sit ahead of all of it, helping an institution decide what to build, where to build it and against what budget.

The portfolio is sorted the way a programmer would sort it rather than by client type: concert and recital halls, multi-purpose halls, opera houses and theaters, academic buildings, museums, renovation and restoration, entertainment venues, and experimental or experiential spaces.

Named work beyond David Geffen Hall includes the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Belmont University, which opened in autumn 2021; the Knight Center for Music Innovation at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music; The Shed, at the junction of the High Line and Hudson Yards; and The Anthem at Washington’s District Wharf. The firm also lists the Molly Blank Center for Opera and Belmont’s Curb College on Music Row among its current work, and points to the San Diego Symphony’s rebuilt venue as recent press coverage of its results.