Fox Theater Renovation

Oakland, CA

A former movie palace, The Fox is a 2,800-seat concert hall in the cultural center of downtown Oakland. This historic landmark venue was opened in 1928 and fell into disrepair when the doors closed for 30 years. After being restored and reopened in 2009, the Fox Theater now hosts popular music shows. We participated in the second phase of acoustical improvements to reduce reverberation and enhance acoustical clarity. The adaptive reuse also needed to meet strict guidelines for historic structures. In a sense, this project is an adaptive reuse because the original acoustics were ill-suited to the current programs. The challenge was to add wide frequency range sound-absorbing materials that are historically accurate where they are visible, without permanently altering the historic surfaces.