The Man Who Designed Ghost Armies and Opera Houses
The most celebrated and maligned living acoustician, Leo Leroy Beranek, now 101 years old, has had a storied career. As director of Harvard’s Electro-Acoustic Laboratory, he perfected the Hush-A-Phone, a telephone accessory that triggered a cascade of regulatory lawsuits from the 1950s to the 1980s. He created the world’s largest muffler to quiet jet engines. His company, BBN, developed ARPANET, the forerunner to the Internet and email. He designed the acoustics for the United Nations Assembly Hall in New York City.
He also has the dubious distinction of having shaped the interiors for the 1962 opening of Philharmonic Hall, the auditorium at Lincoln Center now called David Geffen Hall, which has gone done in acoustics history as a debacle—a much misunderstood one.
When the New York Philharmonic’s lease ran up at Carnegie Hall, the plan emerged to move the Philharmonic to Lincoln Center. After a months-long survey of the best concert halls in Europe that included meetings with the world’s top conductors and music critics, Beranek finished his recommendations for architect Max Abramovitz’s design (the final rendering of which ran as part of a front page feature for The New York Times in 1959).
But the Lincoln Center building committee criticized the original plans for Philharmonic Hall for not including enough seats. Though architect Abramovitz designed a hall with 2,400, the cap Beranek recommended to maintain sound quality, the cries of elitism led him to cram in 2,646 seats, closer to Carnegie’s 2,746.
To fit the extra seats without redesigning the whole hall, Abramovitz decided
