San Diego Symphony at Jacobs Music Center

Transforming Audience Experience

The renovation work at the Jacobs Music Center transforms a historic Fox movie theatre into a modern concert venue, a place for the symphony and the community to thrive for generations to come. The work engaged four key goals: First, it corrected acoustic and performance challenges within the San Diego Symphony, elevating the aural experience to a level commensurate to other world-class concert halls. Second, unseen but equally important, critical upgrades to the 90-year-old mechanical equipment and life-safety systems are complete. Third, accessibility and resiliency challenges have been addressed, greatly extending both universal access and programmatic capacity throughout the Center. In addition to a comprehensive focus on enhancing audience engagement, expansive replacements of the AV, theatrical rigging, lighting, and controls will broaden the range and quality of other productions in the hall. Fourth, this work introduces new spaces within the existing Jacobs Music Center to engage the music, collaborate, and work, in new ways. 

The most transformative changes benefit from structural modifications to deepen the stage, raise the stage opening and enable the construction of a permanent acoustic enclosure. This enclosure, paired with a series of tunable overhead reflectors, optimizes sound distribution. This new configuration adds a choral terrace affording an expanded repertoire, comfortably accommodating larger works like Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. Additionally, the design’s flexibility supports more intimate audience experiences for smaller works right on stage. New seating throughout the hall, and a reconfigured orchestra level, enhance the aural and visual connection between the audience and performers.  

In addition to the modification within the performance space, the mechanical and life safety system have also been upgraded. These critical health and life safety improvements have benefited the acoustic quality of the performance space and allow the capture of additional space within the building for essential Symphony support spaces including essential musicians’ amenities to bring Jacobs Music Center in line with peer institutions to compete for the best talent. 

Respecting, rejuvenating, and enhancing the hall’s historic character, an imaginative and inspiring collection of Spanish Baroque details, endowed the integration of all of this work. Meticulous care accompanied every aspect of the renovation to achieve these aspirations. The new architectural elements draw from the cadence, characters, profiles, and colors of the myriad of details that envelope the hall as conceptual and formal inspiration, creating a dynamic dialogue between their respective eras.