Hasta La Ideas

Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au has completed a major new concert venue and music school in the Danish city of Aalborg, which claims to be “one of the quietest spaces for symphonic music in Europe” (+ slideshow).

Located on the edge of the Limfjord – the body of water that bounds the city – the House of Music was designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au as a cultural hub that accommodates both a 1300-seat performance venue and a music college.

The architect worked closely with an acoustic consultant to develop a curvaceous auditorium that will offer exemplary acoustics. This is encased within a U-shaped volume that contains the classrooms and rehearsal areas of the school.

“The idea behind the building can already be read from the outer shape. The school embraces the concert hall,” said Coop Himmelb(l)au principal Wolf D. Prix.

Externally, the building’s facade is a composition of boxy volumes, undulating roof canopies, circular windows and latticed walls of glazing.

According to Prix the design is intended to represent the unity between music and architecture: “Music is the art of striking a chord in people directly. Like the body of musical instruments this architecture serves as a resonance body for the creativity in the House of Music.”

Visitors enter through a five-storey-high atrium with a concrete staircase winding up through its centre. This provides access to different levels of the auditorium, but also leads to an observation area facing out over the fjord.

Windows within the interior offer glimpsed views into the auditorium from the surrounding spaces. There are also three smaller performance spaces located underneath the foyer.

Water-filled pipes run through the concrete floor slab to provide heating in winter and help keep the building cool in summer. This will be controlled as part of an intelligent building management system.

The House of Music opened with a thirteen-day extravaganza of concerts, performances, film and fireworks.

Scroll down for the project description from Coop Himmelb(l)au:

House of Music as a creative centre for Aalborg

After four years of construction, the “House of Music” in Aalborg, Denmark was ceremoniously opened on March 29, 2014 by the Danish Queen Margrethe II.

This cultural centre was designed by the Viennese architectural studio Coop Himmelb(l)au as a combined school and concert hall: its open structure promotes the exchange between the audience and artists, and the students and teachers.

U-shaped rehearsal and training rooms are arranged around the core of the ensemble, a concert hall for about 1,300 visitors. A generous foyer connects these spaces and opens out with a multi-storey window area onto an adjacent cultural space and a fjord. Under the foyer, three more rooms of various sizes complement the space: the intimate hall, the rhythmic hall, and the classic hall. Through multiple observation windows, students and visitors can look into the concert hall from the foyer and the practice rooms and experience the musical events, including concerts and rehearsals.

The concert hall

The flowing shapes and curves of the auditorium inside stand in contrast to the strict, cubic outer shape. The seats in the orchestra and curved balconies are arranged in such a way that offers the best possible acoustics and views of the stage. The highly complex acoustic concept was developed in collaboration with Tateo Nakajima at Arup. The design of the amorphous plaster structures on the walls and the height-adjustable ceiling suspensions, based on the exact calculations of the specialist in acoustics, ensures for the optimal listening experience. The concert hall will be one of the quietest spaces for symphonic music in Europe, with a noise-level reduction of NR10 (GK10). Thanks to its architectural and acoustic quality, the concert hall is already well-booked: there will be concerts featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with violin soloist Arabella Steinbacher and the Danish National Radio Orchestra with soprano Mojca Erdmann in April.

The foyer

The foyer serves as a meeting place for students, artists, teachers, and visitors. Five stories high with stairs, observation balconies, and large windows with views of the fjord, it is a lively, dynamic space that can be used for a wide variety of activities.

The energy concept

Instead of fans, the foyer uses the natural thermal buoyancy in the large vertical space for ventilation. Water-filled hypocaust pipes in the concrete floor slab are used for cooling in summer and heating in winter. The concrete walls around the concert hall act as an additional storage capacity for thermal energy. The fjord is also used for cost-free cooling.

The piping and air vents are equipped with highly efficient rotating heat exchangers. Very efficient ventilation systems with low air velocities are attached under the seats in the concert hall. Air is extracted through a ceiling grid above the lighting system so that any heat produced does not cause a rise in the temperature in the room.

The building is equipped with a building management program that controls the equipment in the building and ensures that no system is active when there is no need for it. In this way, energy consumption is minimised.

Planning: Coop Himmelb(l)au, Wolf D. Prix & Partner ZT GmbH
Design Principal/ CEO: Wolf D. Prix
Project Partner: Michael Volk
Design Architect: Luzie Giencke
Project Architect: Marcelo Bernardi, Pete Rose
Design Architect Interior: Eva Wolf

Local Architects: Friis & Moltke, Aalborg, Denmark
Acoustics, Audio-Visual & Theatre Design and Planning Consultant: Arup, New York, USA
Landscape Architect: Jeppe Aagaard Andersen, Helsingør, Denmark
Structural Engineering: Rambøll, Aalborg, Denmark;
B+G Ingenieure, Bollinger und Grohmann GmbH, Frankfurt, Germany
Mechanical, Electrical and Fire Engineering: Nirás, Aalborg, Denmark
Cost consultant: Davis Langdon LLP, London, UK
Lighting Design Consultant: Har Hollands, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Interior Design Consultant: Eichinger Offices, Vienna, Austria

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invites orchestras to Aalborg appeared first on Dezeen.

Architect Renzo Piano has replaced the auditorium destroyed during the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, with a flat-pack building comprising three wooden cubes.

Located in the grounds of the city’s medieval castle, the new Auditorium Aquila contains a 238-seat concert hall that opened its doors to the public at the end of last year.

Renzo Piano Building Workshop designed the building with an entirely timber construction. The wooden components were pre-cut and delivered to the site as a flat-pack, before being screwed and nailed together.

The auditorium is located in the largest of the three cubes, which is tilted forwards to create a tiered bank of seating inside. Acoustic panels are fixed to the walls and ceiling to help sound resonate through the room.

The two smaller cubes are positioned either side of the hall. One functions as a foyer, with a refreshments area, cloakroom and ticket desk, while the other contains dressing rooms and a “green room” for performing musicians.

Glazed corridors connect the three cubes and glazed stairwells run up the exterior walls.

The larch panels create horizontal stripes across the exterior of the building and are painted in an assortment of colours. The architects also planted 90 new trees nearby to offset the wood used for the construction.

A public square in front of the structure can be used for outdoor events and performances, when big screens can be hung across the facade.

2012 was a busy year for Italian architect Renzo Piano. Other projects to complete include London skyscraper The Shard and the Astrup Fearnley art museum in Oslo’s harbour.

See more architecture by Renzo Piano, including an interview with Piano from before work started on The Shard.

Photography is by Marco Caselli Nirmal.

Here’s some information from Renzo Piano Building Workshop:

A Stradivarius in Parco del Castello

Three wooden cubes

The auditorium is formed of three wooden cubes that look as though they have somewhat haphazardly tumbled down and come to rest leaning against one another. The central, biggest cube, corresponding to the auditorium itself, seems to be tilting forward, as though about to topple over in an allusion to its instability. There is actually a specific reason for the slant: one of the two lower sides is sloped at the same angle as the stepped seating inside. The cubes may look abstract, but they conceal the presence of a real building. They are ‘non-forms’, or, rather, pure forms, that contrast with the 16th-century fort’s taut, compact mass as inconspicuously as possible.

All three cubes are made entirely of wood, a material that makes no pretension of being anything but ephemeral but is actually eternal. The choice is dictated by the building’s acoustic function, which is to sound like a musical instrument, but also by the context: the timber structures are actually highly earthquake resistant, and the wood’s materiality ‘naturally’ contrasts with the castle’s stone. What’s more, wood is a renewable and therefore ecologically sustainable material: that is why 90 trees were planted near the Auditorium; eventually they will be able replenish to the timber used to build the cube.

The Auditorium can be thought of as a huge Stradivarius laid out in the park. The meticulous, intelligent building technique recalls the craftsmanship of master lute-makers and of building well. It is pleasant to think that larch from Val di Fiemme, in the Trentino, where the most highly-valued wood used by Cremona’s 17th-century master lute-makers, Stradivarius being the most famous, traditionally came from, was used to build it.

The building technology, and the use of cutting-edge earthquake-proof construction techniques in L’Aquila, is an example of building well that can also be used for the old town’s reconstruction.

Above: site plan

The facades’ architectonic slope

The cubes’ outer sides will be clad in larch tiles around 25 centimetres wide and four centimetres thick. The tiles are protected with special treatments aiming to guarantee correct aging due to homogenous oxidation processes. The 16 sides of the cubes that can be seen — two corresponding to the bases supporting the two service buildings — are not all equal but vary depending on various, alternating architectonic criteria that give the structure a light, lively, and vibrant look.
Various colours also provide visual interest.

The sides feature a series of ‘accidents’ that add variety to their wooden surfaces’ homogeneity and geometry. The ‘accidents’ include the staircase spaces contained in glazed volumes superimposed on the wooden surfaces, the blood-red surfaces corresponding to the vertical or horizontal connecting spaces, the fire escape attached to the facades where necessary, and the air-conditioning ducts, which, in the back wall of the foyer, emerge from the façade, treated with a cement finish here. On some occasions, when special musical events take place, big screens can be temporarily hung on the facades, in particular that of the Auditorium and foyer, for the projection of films and images.

Above: long section – click for larger image

The auditorium and the service volumes

The building is broken up into three separate but interconnected volumes: the central volume, which contains the actual auditorium, and the two service volumes: the public service areas, which contain the foyer, located on the town side, and the performers’ service areas, which contain the dressing rooms, located on the castle side.

The auditorium’s volume is a cube with 18.5-meter sides. Considering that part of the cube is located below ground level, the rear corner is 18.5 meters high above the ground and the front corner 9.2 meters high. The foyer is an 11-meter cube whose above-ground height is 10.9 meters. The dressing rooms are contained in a nine-meter cube with an above-ground height of 8.5 meters.

The auditorium is reached through the foyer, which contains a refreshment area, cloakroom and ticket desk. The foyer’s volume contains the public lavatories and spaces equipped for various uses on the first floor, the air-conditioning system’s technical rooms on the second floor and the power plant with direct access from outside stairs on the underground floor.

The public takes an elevated walkway, rising around one meter above ground, to reach the auditorium from the foyer. It will be glazed on the north side and protected with opaque surfaces on the south side and roof.

Above: long section through auditorium

The 238-seat auditorium has a stage that can hold around 40 musicians. Two stepped seating areas facing each other accommodate the audience; the larger has 190 seats in front of the orchestra, the smaller, 48 seats behind it: the seats’ angle ensures the best possible listening and viewing conditions. The walls’ raw wood surfaces are hung with a series of acoustic panels orientated towards the audience to reflect sound inside the auditorium. The panels, also made of wood but with a high-quality finish, ‘soar’ in space, in some cases superimposed on the vertical walls, but always remaining detached from them, in other cases floating in space, hanging from above. Two approximately two-meter-high acoustic walls flanking the stage reflect sound towards the orchestra, ensuring the best possible listening conditions. The musicians’ dressing rooms are on the side opposite the foyer and give access to the autonomous, independent room. This access, which crosses an elevated walkway similar to the one in the foyer, being directly connected with the exterior, is for the musical instruments, including large pieces such as pianos, harps, percussion instruments, etc. A ‘green area’ where the artists will be able to rest and meet one another is planned on the dressing-room volume’s ground floor; two small spaces intended for the house manager and control booth are also planned. The conductor’s and lead artists’ (soloists or singers) dressing rooms, equipped with bath and a small waiting area outside, are located on the first floor. The orchestra musicians’ dressing room and lavatories are on the second floor. The dressing room is modular: it can be subdivided into variously-sized spaces for men and women depending on the number of each in the guest orchestras.

The service volumes’ various floors are interconnected by lifts whose size allows various kinds of users to take them.

Access for means for the transport of instruments, for the provision of catering services and for the facilities’ maintenance cross the outdoor area in front of the auditorium.

Above: cross section through auditorium

The piazza in front of the concert hall

The three volumes face each other in a large outside area conceived of as a natural link between the building and park but also as an area structured to extend the auditorium’s functions outdoors in summer. The space in front of the foyer is fitted out to extend the foyer bar’s catering activities, creating a pole of attraction that will surely be a nice place for a break. The area facing the auditorium’s volume can be fitted with seating to accommodate around 500 people who will be able to attend open-air performances or follow concert activities on a big screen in summer. The outdoor area is laid out along axes springing from the sides of the Auditorium’s three volumes, which intersect, generating patterns of dimensions and geometry.

Above: concept section 

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Renzo Piano Building Workshop appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Norwegian studio Snøhetta has won a competition to design a waterside opera house in Busan, South Korea.

Just like the celebrated opera house the architects designed in Oslo, the proposed building will have a slanted roof that extends down to meet the ground, allowing visitors to climb up to a rooftop public square. Here, marble panels will cover the ground surface and a rooftop restaurant will offer a view towards the mountains.

The curved walls of the building will be glazed and lifted at two corners to create entrances on opposite sides.

The auditorium will be positioned at the heart of the building and will be lined with sound-absorbing cherry to enhance acoustics. Other proposed spaces include a foyer, a function room, a VIP room, rehearsal rooms, a restaurant and a staff canteen.

The Busan Opera House is set to open in 2018.

Read about the Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta in our earlier story or see all our stories about Snøhetta.

Here’s some more detailed information from Snøhetta:

Busan Opera House

The Opera today not only represents our cultural identity, much more than that, it is there to form, shape and create our growing cultural awareness and manifestation. We set increasingly stronger demands to the institution; it is no longer just a passive playground for the elite but can become interactive, democratic, giving as much as it takes, responding to our ambitions and expectations. The Opera house can become the most essential cultural expression that we have in our developed urban societies.
The Opera in Busan is a place to meet, a place to be together in our common cultural context.

The Busan Opera house relies on our current experience of contemporary opera buildings, including the interactive attraction of an open and inviting typology.

Some of the functions, especially its one level and horizontal functional layout is based on Snøhettas experience of designing easy flow and communications within such a building.

The form of the Busan Opera house is derived from its own context and culture.

The basis for the lay-out refers to Kun (Heaven) meeting Kon (Earth) which again meet Kam (Water). The classical trigrams of these elements both describe this site exceptionally well, whilst they refer to the historical and philosophical relationships that are of great importance to Korean culture. The slight bending of the surfaces in Snøhetta’s design are the bars of the trigrams slightly deformed to touch and meet each other in a subtle manner.

The geometry of the building consists of two opposing curves. The lower arching curve bridges the site and anchors the project in the ground. The upper embraces the sky and the Opera is created within the interplay of these surfaces, where the earth touches the sky and the mountains touch the sea. The four corners of the building connect the city and the cultural landmark to the sea. Two of these corners are lifted to form an entrance from the city and an entrance from the sea. These entrances are linked in a continuous public space, flowing around the Opera house and out into the public plaza. The upper plane is lifted on the opposite diagonal to accommodate the programmatic volume and to create an exterior plane that both arches down to the City and the sea at the same time as it peels upwards to meet the sea and the sky.

The compactness and sustainable elements of the project have great importance on economy, sustainability and long-term maintenance of the building.

Building upon the typologies we have previously developed in Oslo the Opera in Busan is changing earlier perceptions of the relationship between opera institutions and its users and the public. By designing an open, inviting and participative building typology, Busan will mark the entrance into a new era of global contemporary architecture reflecting today’s values of equality and democracies, effectively contributing to civic and cultural life on a broad level.

Snøhetta will remain loyal to our contextual and landscape oriented designs also in the future, because we believe this typology to be the most relevant connector between a contemporary public and a contemporary architecture.

Details – unpacking the box:

Soft wrapping: Spanning between the two public planes and enveloping the public functions is the soft flowing skin, offering protection and transparency to the foyer within and linking the ground plane to the roof plane in an unbroken movement. The facade is constructed of panels of glass and marble supported on a two way system of cables spanning between the upper and lower surface. The glazed panels allow for transparency and view in the more vertical sections. The Marble panels form the pedestrian surface rising to meet the roofscape above.

Auditorium: The Opera hall is conceived as a musical instrument. Precisely formed to resonate with the operatic acoustics and resonance. As with the foyer wall the auditorium is to be constructed from solid panels of Cherry wood. The less reflective and with deeper tones, these continuous surfaces envelope and surround the public in an ever changing weave of surfaces, designed precisely to reflect and resonate with the performance on stage. The choice is made for solid materials to maximise the acoustic performance. Particularly the side walls and balcony fronts change in profile and angle to best reflect and resonate with music and performance. Centrally placed above the Parterre is the main lantern. Not in use during performances, this provides an ambient light before and after performances.

Roof Level: The upper surface is a plane of reflection and contemplation set apart from the bustle of the ground. Open and accessible to all, the roof level enjoys un-rivalled views to the mountains and the ocean. This marble surface, punctuated by a grove of flowering trees is the setting for the Fly Tower Restaurant.

Level 4: The top level is dedicated to the administration. These areas enjoy views out to the rooftop atrium garden and direct vertical communication to both the Front and Back of house areas. In front of house there is a public access to the second balcony at this level.

Level 3: This level houses the Academy, rehearsal rooms and staff canteen. This allows for the contact and synergies between the rehearsals areas and the Academy. Direct vertical communication links these areas with the performance space, support areas and changing facilities.

Level 2: Here you find the VIP room. This level provides public access to the first balcony and is the location of the balcony restaurant and bar.

Level 1: This level is the location for the Function room. These facilities enjoy the views out over the foyer and direct access to the first balcony seats.

Level 0: This level is the location for main front of house foyer, restaurant and public entrance to the Parterre. The foyer space wraps around two sides of the building towards the sea. The foyer is entered either from the city side drop off, Parkside or from the Seaside board walk. The foyer provides entrance to all the main public facilities. The main conference hall provides a flexible space that can be utilised for all conference and banquet activities, as well as providing a 2nd stage option with flexible seating and stage possibilities. At level 0 Back of house contains the large rehearsal rooms, performance support, stage, stage making areas. All areas are connected to the main back of house corridor, loading dock and staff entrance.

Level -1: Back of house these levels are the location for the dressing rooms and orchestra rehearsals room. All areas connect directly by vertical communication to the stage and performance areas above. The Exhibition centre is located on this level with a direct entrance to the main foyer above. The public cloakrooms and toilets are located at this lower level.

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Busan Opera House appeared first on Dezeen.

Slideshow: the undulating oak underbelly of four auditoriums bursts through the glazed facade of this concert hall in Kristiansand, Norway.

Designed by Finnish architects ALA, the Kilden performing arts centre opened in January.

The curving wooden wall cantilevers out across the building’s entrance, creating a huge canopy that projects out towards the harbour.

Behind the glass, a sprawling entrance lobby spans the length of the building and leads onto a 1200-seat auditorium, a 750-seat theatre and two smaller halls.

Production facilities are located to the rear of the halls, as are workshops, storage areas and staff rooms.

Aluminium zigzags across the remaining exterior walls of the building and a series of windows create a grid within the folds.

We originally wrote about the project in 2008, when construction was first underway – see a set of visualisations here.

Photography is by Hufton + Crow.

Here’s a full project description from ALA Architects:

“KILDEN”, Performing Arts Center for Sørlandet

DESCRIPTION

The Performing Arts Centre “KILDEN” will house three organizations: the ‘Agder Theater’, the ‘Kristiansand Philharmonic’ and the ‘Opera South’.

The four performance halls are lined up in the mid-zone of the building leaving the production -spaces to the east and audience -spaces to the west side.

Further on the west along the waterside, a huge cantilevered roof will cover both the public city-space by the sea and the foyer space which provides access to the shows.

Waterfront-facade clad with local oak follows the forms defined by the halls and creates a surface separating real world from the illusional.

URBAN IDENTITY

The urban character of the new theatre- and concert hall building should not only express the functionality of the project. The building will have a major impact on the cultural identity of the city of Kristiansand and the whole region. The architectural expression has to be instantly recognisable and unique. There is a strong demand for a cultural landmark building.

Often in theatres the fly tower reflects the buildings function, acting simultaneously as a landmark. On this shore the role of the tower has already been taken by the silo. The signature image of the performing arts centre should be built with other means.

The main concept of the Teater- og Konserthus design is the series of performance spaces, which has been shaped out to act as a sign in the cityscape. This undulating, unified surface forms a dramatic lobby and foyer between the performance halls and the shoreline. The relationship of the building with the canal and the sea has strong tension and drama.

ARCHITECTURAL EXPRESSION

The undulating main façade acts as a surface separating reality from fantasy. This line is crossed as you step into the hall from the foyer. The other façades consist of a vertical folded surface giving the building a subdued elegant form, enhancing the foyer wall as the signifying form of the building. The audience is instinctively drawn towards the public foyer. The building has a desire to please the public, to be popular and understandable to everybody.

The foyer wall is built of local wood, most likely oak. This further emphasises the warm, inviting character of the foyer space. The vertically folded dark facades are made of sharply detailed, stained metal sheets, most likely of brass or copper.

The building is a sharp object with an almost exaggerated clarity of expression. It stands proudly in the rough industrial surroundings. The building creates elegant public and performing spaces and rough, functional production facilities. All this is combined into a shape of an elegant machine –a building as an instrument.

FUNCTIONAL CONCEPT

The striking exterior appearance of the project is the first thing the visitor experiences. It is, however, a result of a careful analytical design process. The main functional concept is to organise all the production facilities of the building along a straight indoor street wide enough for trucks and deliver sets, instruments and materials. The performance halls are arranged to the other side of the street.

The order of the auditoriums is determined by the relations to the production facilities, the relations to the exterior logistics, and the relations between the auditoriums themselves. The main stage theatre hall is located so that the stage opens directly to the set-building workshops. This unit is on the southern end of the building to allow for easier loading and unloading of material. The flerbruksal and the biscene are located on both sides of the main stage for easy co-operation and share of facilities.

The concert hall is located at the northern end of the production street. The underbelly of the auditorium creates a memorable beginning for the curving foyer wall. The support facility zone diminishes next to the concert hall, allowing for the chamfered corner of the volume at the tightest corner of the building site.

FOUR ZONES

The Theater- og konserthus consists of four parallel zones. The public foyer zone is the expressive, free flowing area of improvisation. The public meets each other. Temporary exhibitions and performances are presented. Parties and congresses are held. The foyer zone is easy to navigate- the public can easily find their way to the different auditoriums and support functions.

The auditoriums form the second zone between the foyer and the production street. They are conceived as individual, high-performance instruments for music and theatre production and performance. The architectural expression of the halls is formal and precise. They have a touch and feel of units with multiple uses and a very high level of technical functionality.

The production street is the third functional zone. The street is six meters wide and has full-height doors in both ends. The street ensures great flexibility between the auditoriums and the production facilities. The street also acts as an extra production and assembly space, as well as short-term storage.

The fourth functional zone consists of the production workshops, storage units and workplaces for the staff. This zone opens both to the production streets and the corridors directly above it, and to the outside through windows of the long eastern elevation.

SUSTAINABILITY

Public buildings are an integral part of a socially sustainable environment.

The materials are of local sources. Kristiansand was built on the export of oak to Europe in the 16th century: The main undulating façade of Kilden is built of local oak, CNC milled and fully treated in Kristiansand.

The other three facades are to be made of aluminium from the factory across the fjord. The concrete factory supplying the building site is located 200 meters down the pier. Where relevant, local companies are supplying the project with their expertise, workforce and materials.

Click above for larger image

The building is heated and cooled by district systems covering the whole of central Kristiansand.

Click above for larger image

Kilden will become a truly local social hub.

Click above for larger image

LOCATION:
Kristiansand, Norway

Click above for larger image

STATUS:
International Architecture Competition 2005, 1st prize
Construction start 2007
Core finished October 2010
Construction work complete July 2011
Opening January 2012

Click above for larger image

COMPETITION TEAM:
ALA Architects ltd
Juho Grönholm, Antti Nousjoki, Janne Teräsvirta, Samuli Woolston

Click above for larger image

PROJECT TEAM:
ALA Architects ltd / Helsinki, Kristiansand
in collaboration with:
SMS Arkitekter AS / Kristiansand

Acoustical designer:
BSA: RUP Acoustics / London with BS akustikk / Oslo
Theatre technical designer:
Theatre Projects Consultants / London
Building engineering:
Multiconsult AS / Oslo, Kristiansand
Mechanical Engineering:
Sweco Groner / Oslo
Electrical Engineering:
COWI / Oslo, Kristiansand

Click above for larger image

CLIENT:
Teater- og Konserthus for Sørlandet IKS

Hjem

PROGRAM:
Approx. 27000m2
Concert hall with 1200 seats, Theatre-/Opera hall with 750 seats, multipurpose hall and small theatre hall, offices, workshops, rehearsal spaces, car park for 400 cars.

A slatted timber concert hall bulges through the glass atrium walls of this performing arts college in Cardiff by London studio BFLS.

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

The 450-seat timber auditorium occupies one of three new blocks at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, which adjoin an existing building on the park-side site.

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

A triple-height atrium and exhibition hall connects the separate blocks under a single metal roof.

A bridge across the foyer links the recital hall with a 180-seat theatre in a curved stone-clad block opposite.

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

The third new block, which abuts the existing college building, houses a café and bar on the ground floor and a movement studio above.

Above: photograph is by BFLS

BFLS are best-known for designing the Strata tower in south London, which last year was awarded as the ugliest building in the UK – see our earlier Dezeen Wire here.

Above: photograph is by BFLS

Photography is by Nick Guttridge, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s some more information from BFLS:

Transformed Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama opens its doors to students

The newly completed Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff – Wales’ national music and drama conservatoire – opens to a new intake of students this month.

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

Won in international competition in 2007, the scheme comprises an acoustically excellent 450‐seat chamber recital hall (the ‘Dora Stoutzker Hall’), a 180‐ seat theatre (the ‘Richard Burton Theatre’), four rehearsal studios, an exhibition gallery (the ‘Linbury Gallery’) as well as generous foyer areas, a terrace overlooking Bute Park and a new Café Bar.

The £22.5m project is funded by a grant from the Welsh Government, loan finance and £4m of philanthropic donations. The scheme has been designed to be BREEAM ‘excellent’.

The new buildings are situated within the Grade I listed Bute Park. Directly across the road from the new building is Cathays Park, the civic centre of Cardiff, consisting of a number of important listed buildings.

As Jason Flanagan, Project Director explains: ‘Our approach was two‐fold, to design the internal performance spaces from the ‘inside out’, looking at their acoustic and theatrical functionality as major drivers, whilst in parallel designing from the ‘outside in’, thinking about the civic presence of the building in its urban context.’

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

Hilary Boulding, RWCMD Principal, adds: ‘These new facilities have completely transformed the College. They have inspired our staff and students, and provided us with the very best facilities in which to train our talented young artists and arts practitioners.

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

Furthermore, the new development is rapidly becoming a major new landmark in Wales’ capital city, attracting new audiences to the College and in doing so, helping to significantly raise our profile.’

The design focuses on the core needs of the College community, namely an acoustically impressive sequence of performance and learning spaces which will encourage and inspire the College’s students.

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

The client was very specific from the outset that the new buildings should act as a catalyst for positive cultural change and help foster greater artistic collaboration across the institution.

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

Although the building appears to be a single structure it is in fact three separate new buildings and a renovated existing structure. Each performance space has been conceived separately, the individual components of the building united under a single floating roof, its height determined by the theatre fly‐tower.

The drama building forms a new façade on North Road while the chamber recital hall, clad with a timber screen consisting of light‐coloured cedar wood slats, sits amongst the park’s mature trees. Finishes of stone and timber create a sequence of warm and tactile interior spaces.

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

The new entrance to the college opens out onto Bute Park and a treble‐height arcade forms a new spine between the new and old accommodation, linking the constituent elements, functioning as exhibition space for a range of creative and artistic output.

The Gallery also acts as the ‘lungs’ for the scheme, creating a natural stack effect which ventilates the public spaces.

Project details
Area: 4,400 m2
Status: Completed 2011
Value: £22.5 million

Above: photograph is by Joe Clark

Team
Client: Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama
BFLS team: Jason Flanagan, Paul Bavister, Jason Sandy, Anne Heucke, Kibwe Tavares, Armando Elias
Acoustic Engineer: Arup Acoustics
Structural & Services Engineer: Mott MacDonald
Lighting Consultant: Equation Lighting
Theatre Consultant: Theatre Projects Consultants
Cost Consultant: Davis Langdon

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See also:

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High School #9 by Coop Himmelb(l)au	Tour des Arts by Forma 6	New World Centre by Frank Gehry