An icon on the skyline of Azerbaijan’s capital, Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center houses a conference hall (auditorium), gallery hall and museum, and is intended to play a ‘pivotal role’ in the redevelopment of Baku.
Characteristic of the poor appreciation of audio and acoustics shown by many modern architects, Hadid had stipulated an ‘invisible’ sound system the main 980-seat auditorium.
The arts complex is a tribute to the late former president and father of the country’s President Ilham Aliyev. The centre’s interior spaces are represented by folds in a single continuous surface. Lead technical contractor A Group, based in Turkey, was awarded the contract for audio, lighting and visual design and installation, with Suat Durkan heading a 20-strong project team.
A Group addressed ‘invisibility’ issue by recommending Renkus-Heinz digitally beam steerable IC Live arrays to aim tight beams of sound from hidden locations on specific audience areas, with the highest possible level of audio fidelity for both speech and music.
The company supplied the complete technical design and fit-out including a mechanical stage system and orchestra pit, with a specially designed balustrade, and acoustic towers in front of the loudspeakers: ‘We had originally planned to install the speakers directly onto the walls, but the architect did not want to see any technical products,’ Durkan says. ‘Instead, we designed a system of wooden slots with acoustic cloth, providing 100 per cent audio transmission.’
The towers conceal eight Renkus-Heinz IC Live ICL-FR digitally steerable column arrays, each equipped with multichannel class-D digital amplifiers with integral DSP engines controlling every array element with programmable precision, and equipped with Rhaon, the Renkus-Heinz Audio Operations Network. Each ICL-FR delivers 105dB SPL, with flat output response from 80Hz to 20kHz. Extending the low frequency range are four BP15-2R Rhaon-enabled 2x15-inch self-powered subwoofers and four CF1215R self-powered Rhaon-enabled stage monitors.
‘This centre is of great cultural and architectural significance to the arts in Baku and we are very proud to have made a major contribution to the performance technologies that help make it so special,’ Durkan says. ‘We provided high quality, high intelligibility sound from sources that cannot be seen by the audience – exactly as the architects and designers required.’
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