St. Christopher’s School Recital Hall

711 St. Christopher's Road

Richmond, Virginia 23229

The St. Christopher’s School Recital Hall is a new arts center with a 450-seat recital hall, music teaching spaces, a digital music lab, practice rooms, and a flexible project studio. The existing obsolete middle school assembly hall was converted into needed classroom space. The new building is oriented to create a new campus gateway entry point. The high-ceilinged hall has been set one full story into the ground to reduce its visible height and provide a compatible fit with adjacent campus buildings. The recital hall is designed to be a flexible space serving many diverse gathering needs, such as chapel, lectures, seminars, and musical performances. This feature makes it an important new community venue for the entire school family – a place where students and families can come together to celebrate music, culture, and spirituality.

The scope of work for this project included 28,000 SF of new space and 2,700 SF of renovation. The recital hall was designed with fixed and loose seating on multiple levels and groupings to accommodate various audience sizes. A concealed catwalk system housing professional stage lighting was provided along both sides of the hall. The recital hall space was designed with special acoustic control features such as angled surfaces with both reflective and absorptive characteristics, curved reflective ceiling clouds, and motorized acoustic banners that allow the room to be tuned for different types of music. A large projection screen and projector enables presentations, films, livestream viewing, and audio/visual connections for various performances.