A 335-seat concert hall with lobby and upper reception room, inserted within the rebuilt and expanded historic Haskins Building on the main street of Rockport, MA, is the new home of the Rockport Chamber Music Festival. The worn exterior of the mercantile edifice has been returned to its 1845 Second Empire splendor to enhance the charm of its historic village setting. The interior has been completely reconfigured as a world-class performance venue that integrates the beauty of the ocean setting on which it adjoins. The oceanfront façade has been reshaped to open all public rooms to the harbor and add a new joyful and scaled face to the town’s harbor edge.
Realization
Original Structure and Design Process
Interview with the Architects on the occasion of the RCMF 40th Anniversary
Performance Video
Generous Comments
“The new Shalin Liu Performance Center . . . is one of the best public gathering spaces to appear in years in the Boston area. It manages to be unpretentious but at the same time dramatic.”
“ . . . beautiful to the eye as well as to the ear . . . not only [is the SLPC] a great little hall but a wonderful laboratory for experimentation, with . . . each result outdoing the one before.”
“The new hall is visually striking yet it still exudes a core warmth thanks to the intimacy of scale . . . This space conjure[s] a sense of calm focus. It is a hall for serious listening—and yet it rejects the notion that such listening requires a hermetic seal from the world outside . . . This is an essential new venue for the Boston area, perfectly scaled for chamber music.”