The work of Johnson and his company Artec can be seen in Dallas, Birmingham, Edmonton, Sao Paulo, Nottingham, Toronto, Singapore and Paris, in addition to Budapest. In the course of designing these performance venues, Johnson worked closely with such famous musicians as Daniel Barenboim, Cecilia Bartoli, Kurt Masur, John Neschling and Sir Simon Rattle.
Assessing his company, Johnson said, "Artec is unique. We are the only company in the world with a group of highly motivated specialists providing comprehensive services every technical aspect of world class performing arts spaces for opera, theater, concerts and recitals. Our specialists cover a broad range of disciplines: designers, acousticians, musicians, architects and experts in theatrical lighting, machinery, rigging and sound reinforcement equipment. Artec's basic philosophy of opera house and concert hall design can be neatly summed up in one word: versatile. Our concert halls provide excellent acoustics not just for large symphony orchestras, but excellent acoustics for almost countless forms of music performance - string quartets, choral groups, voice recitals, piano, chamber orchestra, tiny orchestras using period instruments and so forth."
Johnson sought to achieve loudness, warmth, clarity and reverberation in his concert halls. The result, he said, "must be air around the music, as if the music is floating."
The Béla Bartók National Concert Hall
The sound in concert halls must "...have strength, impact, punch and fullness. Sound with lows that are not too weak; highs that are not too powerful. The clarity and the reverberance must be in a natural balance with each other. Musicians and the conductor can hear, or sense, what the audience is hearing. There must be no distancing effect between the orchestra and the public, no harshness of sound, no echoes, no frequency imbalances. There must be air around the music, as if the music is floating."
Johnson was a dynamic proponent of adjustable acoustics systems designed to effectively accommodate the widest possible range of performance types, without losing the quality associated with designing for a specific art form. In concert halls, these included signature adjustable acoustics features such as large motorized reflectors, motorized cloth systems and secondary acoustics chambers, as well as elements that shape the performance area such as adjustable seating and staging systems.
An innovative force also in the development of multi-purpose halls (or concert theatres as he called them), Johnson pioneered unique design elements that resulted in facilities acclaimed for their first class acoustics for music performance, as well as the efficiency of the design and planning of their theatre spaces and equipment. In these facilities, Artec developed signature design features that provide the musicians with a high quality performance environment suited to their needs. Among the best known are: Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York, New York (USA); New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark, NJ (USA); Centre-in-the-Square, Kitchener- Waterloo, Ontario (Canada); Pikes Peak Center, Pikes Peak, Colorado (USA); and the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, West Palm Beach, Florida (USA).
Early acclaimed facilities which Johnson worked on include the Orchestra Shell Renovation at Tanglewood (USA), Derngate Centre, Northampton (UK); Grand Theatre de Quebec, Quebec City (Canada); Centennial Concert Hall, Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada); Crouse-Hinds Concert Theater, Syracuse, New York; Hamilton Place, Hamilton, Ontario (Canada); Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa, Florida (USA); and Place des Arts, Montréal (Canada).
A new generation of Artec halls carrying on this philosophy put in place by Russell Johnson, and building on his legacy of halls and commitment to innovation, will open in coming years in such cities as Carmel, Indiana (USA), Wroclaw (Poland), Reykjavik (Iceland), Aalborg and Aarhus (Denmark), Zarautz (Spain), Singapore (Republic of Singapore), and Montreal (Canada), among others.
Born in Berwick, Pennsylvania, on September 14, 1923, Johnson entered the field of acoustics and theatre planning after studying architecture at Carnegie-Mellon and Yale Universities. Between 1954 and 1970, he worked for Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachussetts, as founder and principal consultant of the Theatre Consulting Division, and as technical coordinator for concert hall and opera house design, including acoustics.
