RAISING A NEW ISSUE IN DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN
Published in the Wall St. Journal on December 21, 2011
By STEVE DOLLAR
Four years after winning a rent-free, 20-year lease on its new home, Issue Project Room is finally taking up full residence at 110 Livingston St. in downtown Brooklyn.
“The space is really unique for the city,” said Ed Patuto, the executive director of the nonprofit arts presenter, which makes its big move on Jan. 25. The inaugural event will be the first American staging of the Dutch new-music festival Gaudeamus Muziekweek.
The Livingston Street site, which resides on the ground floor of a stunning Beaux Arts-style building designed in 1926 by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, has been the focus of a $3.7 million fund-raising campaign, boosted in 2009 by a $1.1 million grant from Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.
Along with more conventional renovations, that sum was necessary for an overhaul of the space’s raw, intensely reverberant interior—which includes a dramatic, 40-foot-high vaulted ceiling—not only to enhance listening quality, but to protect neighbors living on the floors above in what are now condominiums developed by Two Trees Management Company. (The firm purchased the former Board of Education site from the city in 2003 for more than $45 million.)
“New York doesn’t have a European-style chamber-music hall,” said Mr. Patuto, who this year secured another $1.1 million in funding from civic sources to reach the $2.3 million mark—sufficient to proceed with plans to occupy the organization’s new home. “And it doesn’t have a space that is that flexible in terms of how it can
transform. We’ll have everything from black-box capability to a complete white box: We can put visuals anywhere around the room for a completely immersive environment.”
Mr. Patuto took over at Issue Project Room in November 2010—a year after the death of its founder, Suzanne Fiol—and has devoted much of his energy to the transition. With more than 200 performances and 30 commissions in 2011 (much of them focused on avant-garde music and mixed-media work of both local and international significance), the current venue at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus was bustling.
But the downtown space, in the epicenter of the growing Brooklyn arts corridor—which includes the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Mark Morris Dance Center and Roulette, among others—offers a richer spectrum of possibilities.
“The room is really live and has a beautiful, sweet sound,” said Mr. Patuto, who has already overseen a series of special concerts there. Beyond what such acoustics can do for a string quartet, they open all sorts of creative opportunities for experimental artists. This year, in one particularly memorable example, the composer Ellen Fullman ran 50-foot wires across the room. “It became a resonating box,” Mr. Patuto said.
Throughout its new season, the venue will test which kinds of acoustic treatments suit it best. The plan calls for the use of about 50 acoustic panels to deaden specific parts of the space, which features “marble floors, marble columns and brass doors,” Mr. Patuto noted. The organization arrived at a modular approach to design for the space, working with architects Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of WORK AC and acousticians from Arup. It will allow for traditional seated presentations and more ambient events, including performances using a unique 16-speaker array currently installed at the Can Factory.
“There will be no fixed stage, no fixed seating,” Mr. Patuto said. “The experience of coming to Issue Project Room will be as unpredictable as the performances themselves.” …
Of course, Issue Project Room hasn’t quit the Can Factory quite yet. January will offer a closing slate of performances, including a farewell party on Jan. 20 with headliners Jonathan Kane and his minimalist blues band, February.
“Issue’s almost our home base,” said Mr. Kane, who will be celebrating the release of an album recorded live at the venue in 2010 as part of a festival for the experimental music label Table of the Elements. The album also marks the first project to be released on Issue Project Room’s own in-house label, which will document performances fostered by the organization.
He added, “It’s maybe what the Southside clubs were to Muddy Waters or what CBGB was to the Ramones. People dance a lot and there’s a lot of audience enthusiasm.”