Cultural/Worship, Award of Merit Brockman Hall for Opera
Regarded as the most important building for Rice University for the next 100 years, the $77-million Brockman Hall for Opera required exceptional acoustical integrity and a striking European design.
To preserve acoustics, the project team isolated various structural and mechanical components. Early on, the contractor had to resequence excavation and foundation construction when BIM coordination uncovered that the mechanical ductwork housed in the plenum had trunk lines larger than the designed plenum. The overall duct height put the bottom of the duct below the bottom of the proposed slab elevation. Resequencing the foundation allowed the design team to modify the plenum depth and lower the slab elevations.