UNIVERSITY OF IOWA VOXMAN MUSIC BUILDING | Iowa City, Iowa | 2016

Architects: LMN Architects 
Client: The University of Iowa 
General Contractor: M. A. Mortenson Company

Immersed in the downtown core of Iowa City, the Voxman Music Building embraces a collaborative and exploratory student-driven model of education. The building shares musical discovery with the community through its transparent expression and composition of spaces. Conceptually, the pattern of streets and open spaces in this mixed-use urban district extends directly into the multi-level interior spaces, bringing vertical urban vitality and civic presence to the School of Music. The six-story, 186,000-square-foot building lies at a key intersection in downtown Iowa city, creating an entirely new relationship between academic and urban experiences. The program

comprises a 700-seat concert hall, 200-seat recital hall, organ performance hall, music library, rehearsal rooms, practice rooms, classrooms, and faculty studios and offices all linked by a series of vertically connected community spaces. The multi-story glazed corner entry reinforces the merger of campus and city, with the two primary performance venues marking their presence on each of the main facades at the second level. The concert hall cantilevers over the Burlington Street sidewalk and the below-grade student commons, while the recital hall protrudes from the building edge, wrapped in a shingledglass wall system that extends over the sidewalk below. The vertical stacking of acoustically sensitive spaces on a compact urban site presented a significant technical challenge. In response, each space is a discrete, acoustically isolated object with a sinuous, public space flowing between. These naturally lit circulation volumes interlink to form civic gathering areas, a student commons, a performance and rehearsal lobby, and three-story atrium. A fourth-floor terrace is nestled between the faculty offices, serving as an outdoor gathering place for students and the public that frames views to the city, historic courthouse, and countryside beyond. Every feature of the building supports the students, the creative and scholarly work of the faculty, and the school’s capacity to reach the public through more than 350 public events each year. Inside, every performance and rehearsal space is acoustically tuned and tunable. With the ability to adapt to a wide range of musical genres, from voice to percussion to classical to jazz, the building is designed for pedagogical flexibility, serendipitous collaboration, and impromptu performances.

The 700-seat Concert Hall’s design inspires performance and accommodates musical flexibility with a shoe-box arrangement framing a theatroacoustic system. This high-performance digital solution enhances the space by unifying acoustics, lighting, and life-safety requirements in a multi-functional architectural expression. The intricately sculpted, suspended ceiling is assembled out of 946 unique, folded-aluminum composite modules digitally fabricated directly from the architect’s parametric model. Acoustic ray-tracing simulations performed directly in the architect’s 3D model informed the reflector’s curvilinear form, working iteratively with the acoustician to determine the optimal configuration of reflection and absorption of sound throughout the space. In the 200-seat Recital Hall, deep red acoustical paneling optimizes the room’s sound while incorporating a wall-sized shingled-glass window to unite the performance event with the urban experience outside. In the three major rehearsal spaces, high ceilings are filled with swarms of colored, kite-like reflectors that vary between solid and perforated to animate acoustical and lighting effects.