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Whetstone Theater Renovation 2025

Whetstone High School's auditorium in Columbus has new seating, stage curtains and rigging, theatrical lighting, a sound system with wireless microphones, a projector and motorized screen, carpet, aisle lighting, paint and doors, all installed in one project. Prodigy also refinished the stage floor, moved sound and lighting control to a new desk at the back center of the house, and brought in an acoustician to evaluate the room before the new acoustical treatment was designed. Columbus City Schools bought the work through its pre-bid Gordian job order contract.

Whetstone High School's auditorium in Columbus is the room the building uses for everything that is not a class period: assemblies, concerts, awards nights, the spring play. It had aged the way those rooms age. The fixed seating was past its service life, the stage curtains and rigging had been hanging a long time, the sound board desk and control position no longer matched how the room is actually run, and the finishes had been worked around rather than replaced.

Columbus City Schools carried the work on a Gordian job order contract, a pre-bid vehicle with unit prices already established. A single work order covered the auditorium, the gymnasium and building infrastructure. This page is the auditorium.

The auditorium scope replaces the seating, with new ADA seating provided, along with the stage curtains and rigging, the theatrical lighting, the sound system with new wireless microphones, and a projector with a motorized screen. The entrance double doors, the exit doors to the exterior and the single corridor door are replaced, and the door from the stage to the hall is repainted. A new sound and lighting control board sits at the back center of the theater on a new desk. The stage floor is sanded and refinished. Added platforms and stairs come out. Walls, ceilings and the bare concrete under the seats are painted, new carpet goes down, and aisle lighting is added. An acoustician was engaged to walk the room and evaluate it before the new acoustical treatment was designed and placed.

What the district gets is an auditorium whose seating, sound, light and finishes all date from the same season, and a control position at the back of the house that a student can be taught to run.

Stage and house washed in purple and green LED color at Whetstone

Whetstone auditorium seating seen from the stage under new cove lighting

Whetstone stage and fire curtain lit from the house in teal

Battens, chain hoists and line sets in the Whetstone theater fly loft

Renovated Whetstone auditorium looking toward the stage

Technical Discussion

How many wheelchair spaces an auditorium owes, and where they go

When fixed seating is replaced, the new layout has to meet the accessibility standards in force today, and they are more specific than most owners expect. The rules set a count, a size, a location and a view, and at Whetstone they are the reason the front center section was reconfigured.

Bar chart of wheelchair spaces required by the 2010 ADA Standards: 4 for 51 to 150 seats, 5 for 151 to 300, 6 for 301 to 500, and 8 for the 656-seat Whetstone auditorium. A plan sketch shows one space at 36 inches wide and 48 inches deep on a level floor. — Figure 1 — The count comes from the seating capacity. The layout of the room starts from these positions.

The count

The 2010 ADA Standards set the number of wheelchair spaces by the seating capacity of the room: 4 spaces for 51 to 150 seats, 5 for 151 to 300, 6 for 301 to 500, and above 500 seats, 6 plus one for each additional 150 seats or fraction. Whetstone's 656 seats therefore owe 8: six for the first 500, and two more for the 156 above it. Every wheelchair space needs a companion seat beside it, a fixed seat in the same row, so a person using a wheelchair sits with the person who came with them. In addition, at least 5 percent of the aisle seats must have a folding or retractable armrest on the aisle side, for people who can transfer out of a chair or who walk with difficulty.

The size

A single wheelchair space is 36 inches wide, and two side by side are 33 inches each. The space is 48 inches deep when it is entered from the front or rear and 60 inches deep when entered from the side. The floor has to be level, with a slope no steeper than 1 to 48 in any direction. An auditorium floor is sloped on purpose, so each position is a small level platform built into the rake, and it has to be formed in the floor before the new seats are anchored.

The location and the view

The spaces cannot all go in one place. They have to be dispersed so that people using them have a choice of viewing angles and distances comparable to everyone else's, and each must have a line of sight to the stage over the heads of the row in front. Placing all of them at the back cross-aisle, the easiest spot to build, does not meet that test in a room this size. It is also why the positions have to sit on an accessible route from the entrance, which in turn decides where the aisle lighting is needed.

A seating replacement starts with this layout. Once the wheelchair spaces, companion seats and transfer seats are placed, the standard rows fill in around them, and the anchor pattern in the slab follows. Laid out in the other order, the accessible positions end up wherever seats were left over.

Our Work