SHOWCASE SEATING
Curved retractable seating deployed around SSE Hydro and (below) under construction.
to the company’s theatrical roots, fi rstly as a builder of scenery for some of London’s biggest shows, later as the creator of the Steeldeck modular staging system. This fi rst appeared almost three decades ago and is still a world-wide standard with even the earliest production units still in use. The Steeldeck decking directly refl ects the Steeldeck company’s ethos: designed for strength (a four leg deck will support 7.5kN/sqm), built in Steeldeck’s own workshops from the highest quality British steel to be tough enough to survive a long, harsh working life in the real world. “We had a structural engineer analyse Steeldeck once,” Parsons recalls. “He reported that when it eventually failed, everything would fail at the same time – which means there is no waste at all in the structure. He also commented that many of the concrete fl oors they design aren't that strong.”
SEE Hydro’s retractable seating
Those same exacting standards were brought to the Glasgow project. Steeldeck was contracted to supply nine banks of nine-tier high curved retractable seating modules holding around 1200 seats (these manufactured
by Figueras International Seating), which encircle the arena’s fl oor and either pull out to form the crucial link between the permanent upper seating that runs around the area and the arena fl oor, or retract beneath the upper seating, completely hidden from view to give a versatile fl at performance space. To remove the seating, the seats are folded backwards in blocks of three or four and each bank is then driven back across the arena’s concrete fl oor, each level retracting beneath the previous with millimetre precision. Deploying or clearing each unit takes just minutes.
“Hopefully it looks simple now,” Parsons notes. “But the key was that we wanted it to be rugged and reliable, not just now but throughout its working life. The crew in Glasgow will often be extending or retracting the theatre on a tight schedule as part of a turnaround between shows. I didn’t want our seating to ever be responsible for holding that process up; I’d prefer to over-engineer from the start to avoid that – especially for Glasgow, where the crowds are apparently a bit more lively than in some other cities!”
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