by Iona Brannon | photos by Tess Lawyer-Smith
INSIDE INDIANA’S ONLY CONCERT HALL ENGINEERED FIRST AND FOREMOST AROUND THE EAR.
Step through the doors of the Payne & Mencias Palladium on a quiet afternoon, and what’s most noticeable is what’s missing. Sound. The 2½-inch acoustic outer doors of the music hall muffle the outside world. A pause, preparing you for the second set of doors that open to the exquisite hall, 151,000 square feet of space built to be heard.
The exterior is cloaked in more than 15,000 pieces of Indiana limestone, quarried and hand-cut two hours south of Carmel. Inside, the main lobbies are carpeted with 8,500 square feet of Italian stone flooring. The hall floor and stage are Brazilian cherry, beloved for both its beauty and density.
The hall’s ceiling is domed; a glass oculus at the crown draws natural light into the hall through a slightly offset, slanted shaft connecting the laylight to the skylight above.
“The design of the room itself is oblong— we kind of say it’s an egg shape, if you will— and it’s designed so that there are no parallel surfaces,” says Jeff Steeg, the Palladium’s original sound engineer.
It’s one of those details, as Steve Knight, principal and managing director of David M. Schwarz Architects, puts it, worth looking for. The glazing has a Sound Transmission Class (STC) rating of 65. According to the building’s lore, a helicopter could hover overhead without disrupting a show.
“The venue is nearly acoustically perfect,” says Jeffrey C. McDermott, president and CEO of Allied Solutions Center. Designed around the listener’s ear, the Palladium opened in 2011 as the flagship venue of what is now known as the Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel. The $126 million hall remains the only venue of its kind in Indiana, and among the most acoustically sophisticated in the country.
The Palladium’s four-fronted, symmetrical form was inspired by Andrea Palladio’s 16th-century Villa Capra, La Rotonda, in Vicenza, Italy. Washington, D.C.-based David M. Schwarz Architects, with Indiana-based CSO Architects as architect of record, borrowed the exterior symmetry and domed profile, combining it with a shoebox-shaped interior seen in the world’s great concert halls.
“Lots of experimentation over time has proven that relatively tall, narrow, and long rooms work best for non-amplified music,” says Knight. “They are optimal not only for initial sound reflections, but also secondary and tertiary reflections—think of sound like a beam of light bouncing off mirrored surfaces.”
The acoustic strategy was the work of Artec Consultants Inc. of New York, which spent three months tuning it, running 35 events with more than 50 performing groups to prepare the space.
The room was built for symphonic music first, with an intimate single-room design closing the separation between audience and performer. The coffers and ribs on the ceiling, the pilasters and columns on the walls, the ornamental detailing on the balcony fronts, all of it assists in reflecting sound energy back into the room. “Nearly every element in the hall is both acoustically and architecturally driven,” says Knight.
Above the orchestra floor, a 90,000-pound glass canopy hangs from four banks of steel structure. The steel frames are raised or lowered before each performance to tune the room’s reverberation. For a string quartet, the panels descend, and the room opens up. For an amplified rock show, they rise so the sound does not overwhelm the space. Most halls use wood, but the Palladium uses specially engineered glass to preserve the beauty of the ceiling. “The domed ceiling design is so beautiful,” says Knight. “We didn’t want to hide it.”
Curtains lining the box tiers work the same way, staying open to keep walls reflective for classical programs, drawing shut to dampen and control for louder ones.
Even the colors are intentional. Knight cites a principle called psychoacoustics, the idea that what you see shapes what you hear. The burgundy mohair seats; the hues of blue warmed with pink, taupe, and off-white on the walls and ceilings; the Brazilian cherry under foot—all of it was chosen with the listener’s experience in mind.
Seats in the main bowl and in the gallery level are staggered, so you’re never sitting directly behind somebody. Below the floor, conditioned air is pressurized through an underfloor system and pushed upward through vents beneath each seat. The energy center itself sits nearly 700 feet away, connected by an underground tunnel, so no mechanical hum ever reaches the hall even as its temperature and humidity are maintained.
Over the years, the hall has hosted naturalization ceremonies, public debates, and performances by iconic artists including Tony Bennett, Natalie Cole, and Kenny Rogers. And it continues to improve. In June 2024, for the first time since the hall opened, the Palladium got a custom built sound system. Carmel-based Haverstick Designs led an acoustic analysis, mapping the entire hall with LiDAR technology and placing microphones throughout to measure reverberation and identify problem surfaces. The result is a hall that delivers sound evenly from the front row to the back wall, with not a single bad seat among the 1,600. “In a sense, the Palladium is finally complete,” McDermott says.
