Engineering is awesome.

The theatre that I work at, along with its main stage, has a secondary space that it uses primarly for musical performances, as well as rehearsals while the sets are being constructed on the main stage.



When they were giving me the tour, they gushed about how absolutely amazing the acoustics of this space were, comparing it to some very famous site in Italy that I had never heard of before, but I nodded politely nonetheless. That said, when they went into detail about the construction and components involved (i.e., things I understood) my nodding was much more earnest. But that wasn't the coolest part about the room.

THIS is the coolest part about the room:



Can you see what they did there? Here's a bigger picture closer up.



The floor is on hydraulic lifts which drop down into the floor.

Tell me that isn't cool! When they originally told me that had stadium seating built into the floor I assumed it was something that went up, not down. This is much classier than I was imagining. It's apparently all patented technology from some company out in Germany. There is, or was at the time they built this place ten years ago, only one other location in the U.S. that uses this system.

Sadly, this is version is manual, which mean it takes two people and a bit sweat to put it up or take it down. You can't really see it from the pictures but the portion of the floor on the hydraulics is broken into six rows and two columns. Each individual section has two holes cut into the floor than are covered by plastic plugs when not in use.

Each person has a metal pole that is dropped into the whole and rotated to unlock the hydraulics for that section. Every eight inches or so there is a rung built in so you can tier the sections as seen in the last photo. You could also drop them all down to their lowest setting and just make a pit.

While they haven't done it yet, I would love to seem them do a show in the round, with the pit and it's variety of levels used as the stage. I think there are a lot of possibilities to be had there.

So, yeah. Yet another reason why my new job kicks ass.