Tribute: Sir Harold Marshall | Architecture Now

In an article coinciding with the Might 2024 launch of Maurice and I, a documentary movie on the partnership of Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney and the saving of the Christchurch City Corridor, Sir Harold Marshall is described because the movie’s “break-out star”. Marshall, who died on 31 August 2024, two weeks wanting his 93rd birthday, performed a job within the success of the constructing each bit as essential as that of its architects. His concept of lateral sound reflection, developed along with the undertaking, initiated a paradigm shift within the acoustics of live performance corridor design across the world.

Marshall, then a senior lecturer on the College of Auckland’s Faculty of Structure, was the acoustic advisor for the city corridor design competitors in 1965. By 1966, when the finalists’ plans arrived within the put up, he was enrolled for a PhD in acoustics at Southampton College in the UK. Nevertheless, not one of the short-listed competitors entries conformed to the normal European mannequin of live performance corridor design on which present acoustic evaluation standards have been primarily based. Nineteenth-century live performance halls resembling Vienna’s Musikverein and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw possessed glorious acoustics and have been fashions for New Zealand’s early Twentieth-century city halls in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin. Marshall’s problem was to determine a design that might mix architectural and acoustic excellence however he realised that present analytical instruments have been insufficient.

Marshall’s eureka second got here throughout a live performance within the Royal Pageant Corridor in London. Constructed for the Pageant of Britain in 1951, it was a lot wider than conventional live performance halls and he realised that its problematic acoustic resulted from the absence of fractionally delayed sound reflections coming from the aspect partitions to complement the sound emanating instantly from the stage. Recognising the architectural excellence of Warren and Mahoney’s entry, he additionally noticed its acoustic potential. The sound reflectors that have been a part of their elliptical auditorium design may very well be tuned to realize sound high quality corresponding to that of conventional auditoria. He later noticed that the architectural high quality of their design was such that he was decided to make it work acoustically.

Following his agency’s appointment, Warren travelled to Europe to examine live performance halls and joined Marshall in attending performances of Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation, within the Pageant Corridor and the Concertgebouw on successive evenings. The expertise satisfied Warren of the significance of lateral sound reflections and initiated the cooperative and harmonious working relationship between architects and acoustician that ensured the undertaking’s success.

Having accomplished his PhD and additional refined his theories on live performance corridor design in session with acousticians in Germany, Marshall took up a place at The College of Western Australia. There, in collaboration with Mike Barron, he modelled the acoustics of the Christchurch auditorium utilizing an ex-NASA pc, the primary time such superior know-how had been utilized in live performance corridor design.

The opening of the Christchurch City Corridor in September 1972 was a triumph for the design crew, none of whom had designed a serious auditorium earlier than and all of whom have been of their early thirties when the undertaking started. The acoustics of the auditorium mixed a full-bodied, resonant sound with a stage of readability beforehand thought unobtainable in halls of that configuration. Since its opening, the auditorium has been admired by musicians as numerous as conductor Leonard Bernstein, baritone Sir Bryn Terfel and singer-guitarist Carlos Santana.

Arthur Harold Marshall was born in Auckland on 15 September 1931. He attended King’s Faculty, the place he sang within the chapel choir, the start of a lifelong involvement in choral efficiency. He adopted his father in changing into an architect, finishing a Bachelor of Structure at Auckland College Faculty in 1956 together with a BSc in Physics. Following time abroad and a short interval practising structure in Auckland, he was appointed to a senior lectureship in architectural know-how on the Auckland Faculty of Structure in 1961.

He returned there as a professor of structure in 1973. The acoustic analysis laboratory he led achieved a world status. Professor Deidre Brown, a former pupil, remembers him “as a extremely participating trainer [who] drew all of us into the world of sound transmission and the way essential this was for intelligibility and the appreciation of music”, additionally noting that he all the time pressured the aesthetic dimension of structure. As a skilled architect, Marshall was in a position to collaborate together with his friends on equal phrases; a trademark of his acoustic designs is that they’re seamlessly built-in with the structure of the area.

From 1981, in partnership with Christopher Day, he established Marshall Day Acoustics, now one of many world’s most revered and sought-after acoustic consultancies, with greater than 100 workers in workplaces throughout Australasia, in China and in France. The agency’s status was constructed on the improvements Marshall launched in Christchurch and subsequently shared in over 200 scientific publications. It was consolidated by the success of live performance halls all over the world, together with the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, Perth Live performance Corridor, and Segerstrom Corridor, Orange County, California. Marshall’s standing was such that he collaborated with among the world’s most celebrated architects, together with the Iranian-British architect Zaha Hadid on the Guangzhou Opera Home, China, a undertaking that introduced specific challenges on account of the asymmetrical design of the corridor. His profession culminated with the Philharmonie de Paris, designed with famend French architect, Jean Nouvel. A 2015 profile in Le Figaro characterised Marshall as “a magician in sound” and a “star of world acoustics”. At its opening, the Philharmonie was described as having “dazzling readability and beneficiant depth of sound that… [is] like a vivid, bodily presence”. It was, concluded The Guardian’s music critic, presumably essentially the most thrilling place to listen to music within the world.

The Philharmonie was Marshall’s swansong however, in 2015, the way forward for the Christchurch City Corridor remained unsure. Together with Miles Warren, Maurice Mahoney and Christchurch residents, he campaigned to reserve it, submitting to the Christchurch Metropolis Council in particular person and rallying the worldwide acoustics neighborhood to petition town to reserve it. He had the satisfaction of slicing the ribbon alongside his previous good friend, Sir Miles Warren, on its reopening in February 2019.

Marshall was no dry technocrat; he was fascinated by the intersection between metrics and metaphysics, the purpose the place rational evaluation ended and the senses and feelings took over within the notion of sound. He outlined the particular acoustic high quality of an area as ‘presence’. Talking on digicam for Maurice and I, he enlarged on this concept. “The sense of presence is a present; it’s of the identical household as grace and love — none of these could be engineered.”

Harold Marshall was a devoted household man. He was dedicated to Shirley (nee Lindsey), his spouse of 60 years who predeceased him in 2016. They’d 4 sons and household life revolved round a variety of enthusiasms, together with crusing and fishing. The Mount Albert Methodist Church was additionally central to his life. Following his retirement from the College of Auckland in 1998, he spent seven years in Southland in a horticulture enterprise rising hydrangeas. Persevering with calls for for his acoustical experience introduced him dwelling to Auckland, from the place he labored on the high-profile tasks that culminated within the Philharmonie de Paris.

Marshall’s household connections to Mount Albert dated to the early Twentieth century and, in his late eighties, he turned concerned with the marketing campaign to protect the mature unique bushes on Ōwairaka Mount Albert, changing into a patron of the group, Honour the Maunga. His sensible counsel and dedication to the trigger gained him recognition as a kaumātua. The bushes nonetheless stand. His limitless curiosity in regards to the pure world was complemented by his engagement with the humanities; he wrote poetry, painted watercolours and sang in choirs all through his lengthy life.

Few New Zealanders have made better contributions to their chosen fields than has Harold Marshall. He was knighted for companies to acoustics in 2009 and acquired many prestigious awards, together with the Wallace Clement Sabine Medal (Acoustical Society of America, 1995) and the Rayleigh Medal (United Kingdom Institute of Acoustics, 2015). His realisation of the significance of lateral sound reflections in live performance corridor design, modelled at full scale within the Christchurch City Corridor auditorium, conclusively demonstrated that acoustic excellence may very well be achieved in live performance halls that broke with conventional fashions. In doing so, he helped liberate future live performance halls from the straight-jacket of Nineteenth-century options. Musicians and audiences all over the world are the continued beneficiaries of his dedication to each the science and the artwork of acoustics.

Sources:

 Chris Day; John Marshall; Harold Marshall, Korowai of Life and Love, (privately printed, 2022); Ian Lochhead (ed.) The Christchurch City Corridor 1965–2019: A Dream Renewed (Canterbury College Press, 2019); Professor Deidre Brown.