2007 » United Kingdom » Architecture section

The UK Architecture exhibition carries on our overall Collaborators theme and shows work from the national exhibition held in Nottingham in January 2007. UK architects, theatre consultants and designers are all engaged in the continuing challenges of making space into ‘place’ and ‘spaces within places’. Ambitious new buildings such as the Sage, Gateshead are intended as major drivers in the development of, often, depressed environments. They are intended to re-focus a cityscape and to aid both national and local communities in re-imagining their relationship with their culture(s) and their environment. Similarly site specific performances can involve communities in re-imagining their streets, parks, wastelands, ancient buildings leaving, perhaps, an imprint, a legacy of possibilities. Examples of this can be seen in Roma Patel’s The Merchant of Venice designs for the Irish city of Cork and Steve Denton’s Harmony Suite in a derelict street in Liverpool. The re-imagining of existing spaces is as much a part of designing theatres as it is a part of designing performance. We include the redevelopment of industrial buildings such as the iconic Roundhouse in London as well as the re-invention of influential theatre forms as in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Courtyard and Trafalgar Studios in the old Whitehall Theatre, London. The teams assembled to transform or articulate these spaces are of course key to their distinctiveness. This is as true of a performance project as it is of the design, construction and equipping of a new or existing space. At the RSC, Resident Designer Tom Piper collaborated with a team including Theatre Consultants Charcoal Blue, Ian Ritchie Architects, to arrive at an integrated auditorium, stage and set for a two year cycle of History plays. Contemporary performance spaces are required to be endlessly reinterpreted by their prospective users. To have adaptable, technically versatile, designated performance spaces is essential, but the whole building – and even its environment should offer up spaces in which a performed something could, might happen. At Northern Stage in Newcastle, Neil Murray, Head of Design and Associate Director, has worked with The Arts Team to create cavernous epic space in the occasional combination of both their theatre stages and versatile foyer space for exhibitions and performances. Similarly The Sage, Gateshead offers any number of formal and informal spaces in which a reading, music rehearsals, amusic performance, part of a promenade, a moment of dance… can work to re experience the place and the people in it.