Precast Meets Unique Design Criteria for Large-Format Theater

A distinctive shape, special acoustic needs and a tight timetable — precast met all these challenges in an award-winning museum theater project.

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is well known throughout the country and the world for its dedication to children’s needs and development. At 435,500 square feet, it welcomes more than a million visitors per year. When an Omni-Max large-format theater was planned, the museum wanted something that didn’t look like every other theater. It engaged the architectural firm Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf and contractor F. A. Wilhelm Construction Co. to create a durable, long lasting, maintenance-free structure — one that also needed to be erected quickly.

Precast was the material of choice to bring to life the unique tilted-cone shape design for the CineDome™ theater which, together with the Allen W. Clowes Festival Park, comprised a $14 million, 32,000 sq. ft. expansion. The architects needed a material that could be custom designed and shaped to meet unique design criteria—the structure included a 10-degree cone with a five-degree tilt in its base. Repetitive architectural precast panels proved to be the most cost-effective way to clad the building’s uniquely curved surfaces. By incorporating a “stepped” structure the precast could sue repetitive-radius design elements by level.

Another strength of precast is its almost limitless palette of natural colors and finishes. The theatre addition was pigmented to match the color scheme of the existing museum building. Each precast panel features two face mixes to achieve a diagonal patterning throughout the cone’s shape. Precast was also ideal because of its excellent sound attenuation properties. In a theatre, it is important both to keep outside noise out and movie sound in. Precast helped solve the problem of a noisy city location. When the 318-seat theatre was completed all objectives had been met and the project later won a PCI Design Award.