Two concert hall acoustics projects bookend the spring of 2026. In Edinburgh, construction is underway on the Dunard Centre, a 1,000-seat hall whose £162 million construction contract with Balfour Beatty was signed in October 2025, with completion expected in 2029. In Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University's concert hall, opened in 2023, now holds a pipe organ of 4,613 pipes installed in October 2024.
The Dunard Centre, designed by David Chipperfield Architects with the acousticians of Nagata Acoustics as sound consultants, will be Edinburgh's first purpose-built concert hall in more than a century — the last was the Usher Hall, which opened in 1914. The BBC reported the design pairing when plans for the venue, backed by the charity IMPACT Scotland, were first made public. The project's cost has grown far beyond early estimates of £45–75 million, a rise tracked in public reporting on the scheme.
Balfour Beatty's contract, announced by the company in October 2025, covers a five-storey steel-frame building with a precast concrete panel facade behind St Andrew Square. Work on site began within weeks of the signing, according to the project's own announcements, and the hall is now projected to open in 2029 rather than the mid-2020s date once hoped for.
In the United States, Brigham Young University's concert hall has been acoustically complete for longer than its organ was. The hall opened in 2023 when the university's School of Music moved into its new building, but the instrument that anchors its sound — the Létourneau Pipe Organs Opus 100 — was installed in October 2024, per BYU News.
The organ, with 4,613 pipes arranged in 81 ranks, is the third largest in Utah, and unusual in carrying two consoles: one fixed on stage and one mobile, letting an organist play from different positions in the hall. University reporting has called it the crown jewel of the building.
For performers and audiences, the two projects mark the slow-moving calendar on which acoustics run. A hall takes years to design, a season to tune by ear, and an organ more than a year to voice pipe by pipe. By May 2026, Edinburgh's audiences watch a construction site; Utah's hear a finished instrument.
What both share is the conviction that sound in a room can be designed in advance — by acousticians shaping reverberation time in Scotland, and by organ builders scaling tone to a hall's seating count in Utah.
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