project: Nimitz Auditorium

location: Irving Independent School District

location: Irving, Texas

architect: Powell/PSP

Overview

This 1200 seat auditorium serves the high school and community for dramatic theatre, band, lectures, and other types of presentations. Encore Design Group provided systems design and space planning services.

Design Charge

The school district desired a fully functioning theatre capable of hosting large scale dramatic and musical performances. In addition to this auditorium being used by the school and school district, it was also desired to have a theatre that could host a variety of community events and productions as well. This modern auditorium was designed to accommodate many types of presentations at the technical level with state of the art lighting, rigging, and sound systems.

Rigging Systems

The stagehouse has a full height flyloft consisting of 3 motorized linesets and 20 counterweight linesets. The lighting electric battens are rigged by motorized linesets. This motorized rigging system is single speed and has various control and safety features. The counterweight linesets are used to hoist the stage draperies, travelers, cyclorama, and spare battens that may be used for various scenic and drapery elements during productions. All rigging linesets are underhung from structural steel above the stage. The stagehouse does not contain a gridiron.

The counterweight fly system is a double purchase system with a fly gallery elevated above the stage left wing. The double purchase system and elevated gallery was chosen to provide additional wing space backstage. The elevated fly gallery provides access to the counterweight rigging system as well as mounted controls for the motorized linesets. Above the fly rail is an upper rigging catwalk that provides access to some linesets for loading of counterweight as well as access to the upper portion of the rigging grid for maintenance.

Lighting System

The auditorium contains various lighting locations including a front lighting beam (FOH) position (spanning the width of the auditorium), four side lighting pocket positions (2 on each side of the house), three lighting electric battens over the stage, and stage level plugboxes. Motorized linesets allow for access to the lighting electrics while a series of catwalks and ladders are provided for access to the front and side lighting positions. A compliment of ellipsoids, fresnels, par cans, and cyclorama lighting instruments are provided within the auditorium. The auditorium contains infrastructure for the future addition of a DMX distribution system.

A professional, computerized lighting system is provided for control and dimming of the stage and house lighting systems within the auditorium. A lighting control booth is provided at the rear of the house on house left. The lighting system consists of 192 circuits of dimming and a 24/48 channel control console with the capability of hundreds of scenes, submasters, effects, etc. Limited control of the stage and houselighting is provided around the auditorium through wall mounted control panels.

Sound Systems

The sound system in the theatre consists of a main reinforcement system for the audience area, lobby and restroom sound systems, backstage and technical areas sound systems. The main reinforcement system consists of a main central loudspeaker cluster located above the center of the proscenium and three distributed loudspeakers near the rear of the house to provide fill to the rear of the audience area. Inputs and outputs to and from the sound system are located throughout the auditorium (on stage, catwalks, in house floor, etc). A 24 channel professional sound console is provided in the Sound Control Booth at the rear of the house in the center.