Auditorium of Palazzo Blu | Antonio Galeano

Conceived as a work of urban regeneration, Palazzo Blu is a project aimed at the urban-scale recovery of a lot located on the suggestive internal perimeter of the falcata area of Messina, which has always been characterized as the city's historic port.
The project aims to be the southern head area of the building (curtain of buildings originally built in 600 and volumetrically re-proposed also during the recent post-earthquake reconstruction of 1908 of the city), and is designed as a large sloping square facing the sea.
The project for the Auditorium of Palazzo Blu is an opportunity for our study to propose a new type of dynamic acoustic room.
The space with three hundred seats is designed as a single auditorium with rotating acoustic prism walls (on the model of the previous Teatro Annibale di Francia – Messina, 2003) and a baffle ceiling with integrated mobile acoustic totems.
Acoustic totems are three-dimensional profiles in gelcoat able to rotate around a fixed point of their profile. The totems can be wired and integrated with small loudspeakers for listening in amplified mode.
In rest conditions - horizontal arrangement - the acoustic totems form a sound-reflecting acoustic ceiling. When the Totems are positioned vertically, the ceiling reveals the leaves of the baffle roofing system, a system designed to "dampen" the incident sound waves, which are deflected towards the intrados of the Sala floor. The Hall will be tunable through the arrangement of all the intermediate positions of the Totems, from the horizontal position (maximum reflectance) to the vertical position (minimum reflectance).
The ceiling system in the common operation will be integrated with the acoustic prism walls described above. The projected range of the sound reverb tail varies between approximately 1 and 2 seconds.