Hasta La Ideas

A wooden treehouse with circular perforations is suspended from the ceiling inside this space for a south London theatre company for disabled children, echoing round patterns on its facade (+ slideshow).

Designed by London firm Hawkins\Brown, the Oily Cart theatre company headquarters sits in the Grade II listed annexe of Smallwood primary school in Wandsworth.

The theatre was created to give children who have disabilities and learning difficulties a place to express themselves artistically.

“Oily Cart works with children who have multiple and complex learning difficulties, helping to bring theatre to audiences who might not otherwise have the chance to experience it,” architect David Bickle told Dezeen.

The exterior of the building features an original soot-coated brick facade and an existing Victorian staircase, which leads up to the studio.

“We were very careful to retain as much of the original structure as possible and wanted to incorporate the same energy into the building as the theatre puts into its productions,” Bickle said.

The architect also installed a bright yellow aluminium lift dotted with black and white spots, which connects the playground outside to the theatre and provides access for disabled children.

“The golden lift, which rises up to the theatre, creates a link between the ordinary outdoors and the extraordinary world of the theatre inside,” Bickle added.

The top of the lift shaft was inspired by the traditional Dutch gables that line the roof of the primary school and is designed to mirror the original Victorian architecture.

On exiting the lift, the first floor lobby leads into an office and admin area with a mezzanine level above. The architects were given permission to remove a dividing wall and create a multipurpose timber treehouse punctured with circles, which hangs over the space.

“The circular theme that runs throughout the build was inspired by the scented bubbles the theatre use to get in touch with their audience,” Bickle explained. “The circular motif that runs across the facade and treehouse are designed to be effervescent like the bubbles themselves.”

Spotlights built into the underside of the wooden cube are designed as an extension to the circular pattern and illuminate a table in the centre of the office.

Upstairs, the timber meeting room extends into the roof and features skylights that fill the box with natural light.

The firm also improved existing studio and storage areas to create a workshop for building original props on the ground floor. The addition of a costume wardrobe, furnished with sewing machines and work benches, allows for every element of the theatre’s productions to be managed on site.

The architects used a bold colour scheme throughout the structure, coating interior walls with primary colours to differentiate between the spaces.

A white-walled group room with suspended strip lighting offers space for the children to take part in drama workshops, while a combined lounge and kitchen provides a place for the children to relax in between rehearsals.

Oily Cart theatre was recently nominated for a Royal Institute of British Architects London Award.

Photography is by Tim Crocker.

Here’s some more text from Hawkins\Brown:

Oily Cart Theatre, Wandsworth, London

Located in the annexe of the Victorian Grade II listed Smallwood Primary School based in Tooting, Wandsworth, Oily Cart theatre works entirely with children, many of whom have complex disabilities and often attend special needs schools. The theatre group aims to provide cultural stimulation for these often under-serviced audiences.

Stirling Prize nominated architects, Hawkins\Brown, worked with the Oily Cart theatre to create an inspiring and playful scheme in keeping with the theatre’s ethos. The complete development of Oily Cart productions is housed in the annexe, from inception and management through to prop building, costume design and rehearsals. The scheme dramatically improves workshop, rehearsal and storage facilities for the theatre and reconfiguration of spaces as well as improving working conditions within office spaces.

The original theatre had poor accessibility for its occupants and one of Hawkins\Brown major interventions was the addition of an external lift with patterned anodised aluminium panels to access the first floor of the theatre, formerly only accessible via an external staircase.

Bold colours were used throughout the theatre to aid with orientation around the spaces and a new mezzanine level insert was added to the building that acts as a flexible meeting room, as well as clean and dirty workshops to make all of the necessary props, sets and costumes for the theatre.

The resulting building creates an inspiring, bright and tactile space for children to lean and play, as well as reusing and recycling materials and found objects from the site.

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headquarters by Hawkins\Brown appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen has won a competition to design a theatre and cultural centre in Hjørring, Denmark, with plans for a series of buildings clad in Corten steel (+ slideshow).

Working alongside local firm Arkitektfirmaet Finn Østergaard, Schmidt Hammer Lassen will design a 4200 square-metre complex named the Vendsyssel Theatre and Experience Centre, which is set to open in 2016.

The development will be made up of several rectilinear blocks, with walls of Corten steel and glass intended to fit in with the brick and plaster facades that typify the town’s architecture.

“We have designed a project where the architectural and functional concept has five main themes: integration in the city, openness, functionality, flexibility and materiality,” said architect John Foldbjerg Lassen, who is one of the founding partners of Schmidt Hammer Lassen.

“We have designed a significant building which relates to its function in a pragmatic way,” he added. “It invites both active use and quiet breaks. It is a building that radiates its cultural meaning – it dares to be different, without stealing the focus from the existing qualities in the city.”

The architects propose an open-plan layout that will allow corridors to be repurposed as backstage facilities.

“The open plan ensures a high level of flexibility in the building, and only your imagination sets the limit for where and how the theatre productions can take place,” said architect Rasmus Kierkegaard.

“Actors and staff are visible to the visitors in the building, and the building will appear vibrant even with only a few persons present,” he added.

Here’s some more information from Schmidt Hammer Lassen:

Schmidt Hammer Lassen architects wins competition for Vendsyssel Theatre and Experience Centre

As part of a team, schmidt hammer lassen architects has won the competition to design Vendsyssel Theatre and Experience Centre in Hjørring, Denmark. With this 4,200 square metre building, Hjørring gains a vibrant cultural hub in which to feature the city’s various cultural activities. The winning design was submitted by a team including schmidt hammer lassen architects, Arkitektfirmaet Finn Østergaard, Brix & Kamp, ALECTIA, Gade & Mortensen Akustik, AIX Arkitekter, Filippa Berglund scenography, and LIW Planning.

The architectural ambition for the new Theatre and Experience Centre has been to create a building which blends into the surrounding environment while standing out as a new, vibrant organism in the city.

The Theatre and Experience Centre consists of a complex of buildings – a city within the city. Its characteristic corten steel façade, with its warm rusty red colours, corresponds well with the area’s existing plaster and brick façades; thereby creating an aesthetic whole between the city, the front plaza and the theatre building. A vibrant building with a glimpse of the backstage.

Inside, an open plan solution ensures visual and physical connections across the building. The boundaries between publicly accessible areas and the more traditional theatre functions are blurred. In the building layout special attention has been paid to making sure that all functions can operate optimally. At the same time many areas can be joined and the circulation areas can be used as backstage facilities.

Completion of Vendsyssel Theatre and Experience Centre is expected in 2016.

Architects: schmidt hammer lassen architects and Arkitektfirmaet Finn Østergaard A/S
Client: Municipality of Hjørring, Realdania
Area: 4,200m²
Construction cost: €16.5 million excl. VAT
Competition: 2013, 1st prize in restricted competition
Full-service consultant: schmidt hammer lassen architects
Engineer: Brix & Kamp A/S and ALECTIA A/S
Landscape architect: LIW Planning Aps
Other consultants: Gade & Mortensen Akustik A/S, AIX Arkitekter AB, Filippa Berglund, scenograf, arkitekt maa

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for Danish theatre complex appeared first on Dezeen.

New York studio Asymptote has designed a faceted performing arts centre for South Korea that references the curved rooftops of ancient Buddhist temples and pavilions (+ slideshow).

Proposed for a site that connects the city of Sejong with a park and river, the Sejong Center for Performing Arts is designed by Asymptote as an asymmetric building accommodating a grand auditorium, a small theatre and a cinema.

The architects combined a series of flat and curved surfaces to generate the multi-faceted form of the building, intended to relate to various Korean architectural styles.

“By confronting different aspects of the site the architecture sets out to capture the city’s vitality and history, by alluding tectonically to the spirit and flavours of local Korean architectural traditions,” said the architects. “The curved and mathematically precise roofs of nearby pavilions and temples are quoted here and set against the stoic solidity of traditional monumental buildings.”

Some of the exterior walls will integrate outdoor cinema screens, while a glass facade will function as a huge shop window to present some of the theatrical activities taking place inside.

Entrances are to be positioned on the east and west elevations, creating a lobby that cuts through the centre of the structure. This axis will lead directly to cafes, ticket desks and waiting areas.

Asymptote is led by architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture. Past projects by the firm include a hotel that straddles a race track in Abu Dhabi. See more architecture by Asymptote »

Here’s more information from the architects:

Sejong Center for Performing Arts

Asymptote’s design for a new centre of performing arts for the city of Sejong in South Korea celebrates the city’s emergence and growth as a place of stature and culture. The proposal calls for an architecture centred around notions of contemporary urbanism as expressed through a distinctive and unique envelope and object-bulling perched on an open site that connects the city, a park and nearby waterway. By confronting different aspects of the site the architecture sets out to capture the city’s vitality and history by alluding tectonically to the spirit and flavours of local Korean architectural traditions. The curved and mathematically precise roofs of nearby pavilions and temples are quoted here and set against the stoic solidity of traditional monumental buildings also part of the surroundings.

The new Sejong arts centre is designed to seamlessly connect to the city fabric where the two main entrances to the building are placed along an east-west axis that cuts diagonally across the site. As this axis passes through the building’s interior it connects the upper foyer of the arts centre with the city centre to the west and the riverside park and museum district to the east. The treatment of the main urban facade as a large multi-story glass expanse creates a theatrical display and show window into the world of performance and theatre. With its intricate patterns of louvres the facade performs environmentally as well as aesthetically providing a compelling and dramatic backdrop to the exterior public space that it overlooks.

The interiors are designed to make for a theatrical setting for the audiences gathering and using the buildings spaces. Two theatres and nested into the buildings interior as well as cafes, reception and waiting areas cinemas and other functions. The notion of bundling and ‘packing’ the buildings function into a singular experience and form allows for both utility and a powerful and ‘episodic’ interiority and experience. The New Sejong Performing Art Center is a centrepiece for the city, a gathering place of history, contemporary culture, performance and spectacle.

Date: 2013
Size: 15,000 sqm
Location: Sejong, South Korea
Architect: Asymptote Architecture
Design Partners: Hani Rashid, Lise Anne Couture
Project Director: John Guida
Design Team: Danny Abalos, Bika Rebek, Du Ho Choi, Hong Min Kim, Project Team” Matthew Slattery, Valentina Soana, Mu Jung Kang,
Client: Multifunctional Administrative City Construction Agency (MACCA) Local Architect: EGA Seoul Structural Engineer: Knippers Helbig Stuttgart- New York
Environmental Design: Transsolar Inc. New York

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by Asymptote appeared first on Dezeen.

Architecture firm Haworth Tompkins has installed a bright red auditorium amongst the brutalist concrete of London’s National Theatre (+ slideshow).

Haworth Tompkins designed The Shed as a monolithic red box, entirely clad with rough-sawn timber boards. This material references the board-formed concrete of Denys Lasdun’s celebrated 1970s National Theatre and was intended by the architects to appear as its opposite.

Four towering chimneys rise up from the corners, helping to draw air through the structure using a stack-effect system of natural ventilation. These chimneys were also planned as a reference to the architecture of the theatre and they mimic the angular geometry of its riverside facade.

A temporary foyer is created beneath the existing balconies and leads straight through into the 225-seat auditorium.

Reclaimed chairs provide all of the seating inside the building, while recycled materials were used for all of the cladding and surfaces.

“This collaboration has been a wonderful opportunity to explore the ways in which temporary public buildings can alter our perceptions of places and organisations,” said practice director Steve Tompkins. “We hope The Shed will be seen as a playful but thoughtful building, both challenging and complementary to the permanent cultural architecture.”

Above: photograph is by Philipe Ville

The auditorium will remain in place for a year, temporarily replacing the Cottesloe Theatre room while it undergoes a renovation.

Pop-up theatres and cinemas have become increasingly popular in London over the last few years. In 2011 a team of volunteers built a cinema under a motorway flyover, while a theatre for an audience of six travelled around Clerkenwell during last year’s design week in the district.

Above: photograph is by Philipe Ville

Other temporary theatres created recently include one made from scaffolding and plastic pond liner in southern England and one in Estonia made from straw bales. See more theatres on Dezeen.

See more architecture by Haworth Tompkins, including the new home for print-making and photography at the Royal College of Art.

Photography is by Hélène Binet, apart from where otherwise stated.

Above: photograph is by Philipe Ville

Here’s some extra information from the architects:

Haworth Tompkins creates temporary venue at the National Theatre ‘The Shed’

Haworth Tompkins announces the completion of The Shed, a temporary venue for the National Theatre on London’s South Bank. The Shed will give the NT a third auditorium while the Cottesloe is closed for a year during the NT Future redevelopment, also designed by Haworth Tompkins.

The artistic programme for The Shed, recently announced by the Director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, pushes creative boundaries, giving the NT the opportunity to explore new ways of making theatre. In the same way, The Shed has been a test bed for experiment by the architectural design team. Conceived by Haworth Tompkins and regular collaborators Charcoalblue, it was then designed and built in little more than a year, a collaborative process between the building designers, the National Theatre, and theatre-makers who will work in the space, in a way that more closely resembled a theatre show than a conventional construction project.

Above: photograph is by Philipe Ville

Its temporary nature, building on Haworth Tompkins’ earlier temporary projects like the Almeida Theatre at Gainsborough Studios and King’s Cross, permits a structure that can be seen less as a building than as an event or arts installation – a vibrant intervention on London’s South Bank that will entrance, and sometimes bewilder, passers-by for a period of twelve months.

Above: photograph is by Philipe Ville

The Shed occupies Theatre Square, at the front of the National Theatre, beside the river. Its simple form houses a 225-seat auditorium made of raw steel and plywood, while the rough-sawn timber cladding refers to the National Theatre’s iconic board-marked concrete, and the modelling of the auditorium and its corner towers complement the bold geometries of the NT itself. A temporary foyer has been carved out from the space beneath the NT’s external terraces and provides easy connection to the existing foyers. The Shed’s brilliant red colour covering the entire mass of a form without doors or windows, announces its arrival boldly against the concrete bulk of the NT, giving it a startling and enigmatic presence.

Above: photograph is by Philipe Ville

The Shed also represents another step in Haworth Tompkins’ ongoing project to research sustainable ways of making theatres. Built of materials that can be 100% recycled and fitted out with re-used seating, The Shed is naturally ventilated, with the four towers that draw air through the building providing its distinctive form.

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by Haworth Tompkins appeared first on Dezeen.

Polish studio Ingarden & Ewý has slotted a theatre and library around the nineteenth century structure of a former horse-riding arena in Kraków (+ slideshow).

Bringing together two existing organisations, the Małopolska Garden of Arts (MGA) contains both the Małopolska Voivodeship Library and the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre that had been already been using the old building as a venue for workshops.

Architects Krzysztof Ingarden and Jacek Ewý extended the building to create a T-shaped plan, surrounded by a glass curtain wall with a cloak of chunky clay louvres.

This stripy cladding was designed with an uneven profile to mirror the shapes of surrounding buildings. Ingarden describes this as a game between “mimesis and the abstraction”, meaning that the building both refers to its context and is distinctly different from it.

The library occupies the western wing of the T-shaped plan, while the theatre stretches north to south, beside a large indoor garden filled with benches, planting beds and a maple tree.

Partially sheltered beneath a skeletal roof, this space is open to the public and was designed to “transport the gateway to the stage out onto the street” and hence entice visitors into the theatre, cinema, events room and cafe.

The library has its own entrance and contains three floors of reading rooms and study areas that face out onto a pedestrian passageway along the side of the building.

Ingarden & Ewý won a competion to design the Małopolska Garden of Arts back in 2005 and it finally opened to the public last month.

It was also recently awarded the Janusz Bogdanowski Award for making the greatest contribution to architecture in Kraków in 2012.

See more projects in Poland, including the world’s narrowest house and a sports centre with rooftop tennis courts.

Photography is by Krzysztof Ingarden.

Here’s more information from Ingarden & Ewy

The building of the Małopolska Garden of Arts (MGA) has been constructed according to a competition-winning (Union of Polish Architects, SARP 2005) design by Ingarden & Ewy Architects. The initiative of establishing a new cultural institution in Kraków was proposed a year earlier by Krzysztof Orzechowski, Director of the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre and Janusz Sepioł, at the time the Marshal of the Małopolska Region. It is no coincidence that the building was raised in the vicinity of ul. Karmelicka – a street popular with students and locals alike – opposite the building of the public library, with the aim of ensuring its smooth inclusion into the “bloodstream” of the city.

The building of MGA introduced new spatial order to the old backyards and ruined buildings in Rajska and Szujskiego streets in Krakow. The starting point was a multifunctional hall, which was entered into the outline of the old, 19th-century horse-riding arena, used in the last years of its history as workshops and storage space for the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków.

The Małopolska Garden of Arts is a cross between two institutions: the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre and the Malopolska Voivodeship Library. The wing on Szujskiego Street holds a modern art and media library, with multimedia books and music, while the section standing on ul. Rajska has been developed by the theatre, and is equipped with a multifunctional events hall. The new hall – operating, as a studio theatre, conference room, concert hall, and venue for banquets and exhibitions – holds retractable stages for 300 people. State-of-the-art stage technology is present overhead: fixed on hoists and cranes to the steel ceiling girders. This allows dramas and concerts to be performed, and exhibitions, film screenings, symposiums, conferences, art auctions, fashion shows, and many more events to be held. Altogether, the space of about 4300 sq.m houses a theatre together with a cosy cinema with 98 seats, a café, and premises for the organisation of educational, art-related activities.

Honing the form, the architects focused on interaction with the future recipients, which is why the entire spatial form of the symbolic, openwork roofing raised over the garden from the side of Rajska Street – though not functioning as an actual roof – is there to transport the gateway to the stage out onto the street. In this way, the building delicately nudges passers-by with the skilful manipulation of the form, already at first glance giving the onlooker the impression of going beyond the borders of a garden, where culture is grown in evenly planted rows. Further proof of the sophisticated play with the space is the garden itself. Imitating flower beds, the equal bands with low greens are a metaphor of a garden: as much as the architects could afford here. A notable fact is that historically “ulica Rajska” – literally “Paradise Street” – led to the Garden of Paradise, which was later replaced by the developments of the Tobacco Works.

Architect Krzysztof Ingarden (collaborating with Jacek Ewý), claims that the form of the building is a contextual game between “mimesis and the abstraction”. In practice, this means that the building is by no means a simulacrum of the context, but rather draws inspiration from the code of contextual forms by making references to the geometry of the roofs and tissue of the neighbouring structures applied for the abstract geometrical compositions of the façades. The building fits the scale of its environment perfectly by maintaining the lines of the roof and divisions of the façades in line with the composition and linear solutions of the neighbouring buildings.

The final impact is the result of the designers’ sensitivity to signals coming from the environment. For example, the opening in the perforated roof of the garden was formed, especially for the maple tree that grows there. In recognition of its exquisite sense of spatial composition and creative form in historical context, the building was awarded with the Professor Janusz Bogdanowski Prize, for the best architectural achievement in Krakow in the year 2012.

In this place, the cultural life of the Kraków’s young artistic set will blossom under a shared roof. Modern ballet, contemporary theatre forms, audio and video arts, concerts, and all and any other artistic pursuits will find their home here.

Above: computer rendering

Above: basement plan

Above: ground floor plan

Above: first floor plan

Above: section A-A – click above for larger image

Above: section B-B – click above for larger image

Above: section C-C – click above for larger image

Above: section D-D – click above for larger image

Above: section E-E – click above for larger image

Above: west elevation – click above for larger image

Above: south elevation – click above for larger image

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by Ingarden & Ewý appeared first on Dezeen.