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PROJECT REPORT: CULTURAL, CIVIC & FAITH BUILDINGS
“A core idea was that it is a building for everyone, and also a very different beast to what the old building was, so they wanted to feel like it was a rebirth of the whole thing”
Alastair Bogle, Bennetts Associates FACING PAGE
Feature staircase within courtyard foyer, with view of retained auditorium’s brick structure © Hufton + Crow
anyone using the cafes also gets to benefit. The connected brick-clad new buildings plus the existing theatre auditorium presents a unified form, but one whose facades are broken, to give a more approachable feel. “It couldn’t work as a singular monolithic thing in terms of a straight facade in that setting, it wouldn’t be appropriate.”
Although the building has a new main entrance, unusually for theatres it “doesn’t really have an obvious back, and is more of a 360 degree building really,” says Bogle. This makes circulation and external access, as well as the aesthetic approach overall, more of a challenge.
Dealing with the river was not so much of a headache, given that the gradient dropped down “quite soon” after the curtilage. A bigger design challenge was posed by the sound of the fast-flowing river, with a large amount of focus being placed on the soundproofing of the auditorium and cinema spaces.
Exposing CLT’s potential To benefit the building’s overall embodied carbon, the architects and engineers specified the new upper stories of the added buildings as CLT boxes. Bogle says he has enjoyed seeing these boxes go up on site, “as each houses a function – a cinema, a studio, a rehearsal room, so it’s very much like the brief manifested in individual buildings around the site.” He says there are “myths around the use of CLT” which can be a challenge to counter, and fire safety requirements sometimes do mean “you do end up having to cover it up quite a lot, which is a real shame.” However, here he says “it’s been really nice to be able to keep it exposed where we can.”
He continues that the architects were particularly pleased with the “raw” CLT they achieved in the circulation corridors, “before you reach the ‘cinema world.’” This enables a rare change for the users to engage with and understand the upper storeys’ timber structure, with elsewhere the external brick language being brought into common areas internally. In terms of the facades, the architects came up with a brick concept which subtly tied into historic buildings in Hertford, but also added a vibrant new identity using a protruding and glazed brick pattern. Bogle explains: “The context of Hertford is quite a lot of brick and glazed brick and tile, and
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we thought that would work really well for us.” They selected a brick from local manufacturer HD Matthews, working closely with them to “get the blend right” and produce a custom clear, crackled glaze. The relief pattern of glazed bricks looks somewhat random and natural, but “actually took a long, long time to work out.” With the slight differences in shape which naturally occurs, the light reflects in a variable way across the faces, creating a shimmering effect, which is “a bit theatrical,” says Bogle.
A new identity
The considerable amount of CLT in the building is not the reasoning behind the name for the building being ‘BEAM’ (subtitled ‘Stage, Screen Social’), as Bogle explains. There was a lot of input from stakeholder groups as part of the extensive consultation, and there was consensus that the word ‘theatre’ should be avoided as the building is so much more than that. The consultation “just reinforced how important this building would be to the community and how much engagement people wanted to have with it.” It “allowed us that greater sense of how important the job that we were doing there was.” He continues: “A core idea was that it is a building for everyone, and also a very different beast to what the old building is, so they wanted to feel like it was a rebirth of the whole thing.” The name refers to a beam of light, and “outreach into the community,” says Bogle, “but it can mean many different things that are obviously also theatrically based.”
Fitting several different functions onto a constrained site has not resulted in a set of cramped spaces, shares Bogle, he says: “We have used the site to its maximum, but from an internal organisational point of view, it feels both spacious and intimate.” Internally, the blocks flow into each other, with clear visual connections but function as individual entities. “You can see you can always see two other spaces, and how they are layered – there’s a really rich flow, but at the same time everything does feel like its own area,” says Bogle. There are quieter spaces provided for those that need an escape, andeverything “connects back to the triangular courtyard.”
The original access for theatre deliveries was on the river side of the building – “the wrong side,” says Alastair. “So we flipped it to the yard side, and created a proper
ADF JULY/AUGUST 2024
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