Holt Memorial Chapel
A century-old chapel where the organ needed the reverberation and the sermon needed the opposite.
Holt Memorial’s organ and choir depend on the reverberation the stone nave has carried for a hundred years; the spoken word does not. The two needs point in opposite directions in the same room, which is the oldest problem in worship-space acoustics and still not a solved one.
Rather than shorten the room’s natural decay, we left the reverberation alone and solved intelligibility with a distributed sound reinforcement system aimed at direct coverage over amplification, plus targeted absorption in a handful of parallel-surface flutter zones the model flagged. The organ still fills the room the way it always did; the sermon, for the first time in decades, doesn’t have to fight it.