Performing Arts

“Hurrah for Haworth Tompkins. There is now a generation of audiences who won’t remember what theatres were like before this inspiring firm of architects shook them up and opened them out. Before 2000 the Royal Court did not have its big red drum, the Egg in Bath had not been hatched, the Young Vic was all bunched up, Battersea Arts Centre’s different rooms were closed in on themselves. Haworth Tompkins have made theatres more welcoming, more continuous with life outside. They started reshaping the stage when site-specific work was beginning to boom, reminding audiences of the importance of the places in which we see plays. Their impact has been as great as that of an artistic director.”

Susannah Clapp, The Guardian

“Haworth Tompkins are London’s default theatre architects, whose works span the magically ad hoc to the unutterably grand.”

Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times

“The Shakespeare of modern-day theatre architects.”

The Telegraph

“Above all, the brilliant thing about working with Haworth Tompkins is their camaraderie, teamwork, sense of humour and ability to tolerate high levels of stress whilst remaining true to the vision of the project.”

Dame Vikki Heywood

“A body of work as rich in character as that of any practice working in Britain today...these buildings feel like eternal works in progress, open to reinvention from production to production, even from night to night.”

Ellis Woodman, The Telegraph

“We owe a debt of gratitude to an architectural practice who don’t just do design, they also do cultural change.”

David Jubb, Artistic Director

We have been immersed in thinking about, talking about, designing and experiencing performing arts buildings for three decades now, working with many of the world’s most influential show makers. We are regularly named amongst the most experienced and influential theatre architects currently practicing. Our explorations have ranged from developing ideas of increased porosity, accessibility and welcome of front of house, to the potency of provisional or temporary performance space, to high density adaptive auditoria, through to civilised dressing rooms and publicly engaging production workshops. All are driven by an overarching mission to rewire our thinking around sustainability, well-being and regenerative design. We work best in collaborative relationships: with clients, with artists; and with innovative suppliers. Our experience has helped us to understand that designing a performance space, whether large or small, retrofitting or building new, is a creative relationship that can be transformative for us all.

We have developed a deep sensitivity to how a performance room ‘works’, honing the intensity of relationship between actor and audience - and between every member of the audience to each other - that is essential in generating a shared, theatrically electrified experience. We see the auditorium design not so much as crafting a finished object, but rather as forming a permissive framework to host generations of incoming show makers. We strive for rooms with malleability and adaptability to give directors and designers a welcoming and potent room to empower their work - both emotionally and technically - and to fully embrace the audience.

Theatres are an increasingly rare bastion of public gathering space, places for people of all backgrounds to meet in a welcoming, inclusive environment. Foyers are important public rooms in their own right, an extension of the public realm, a gathering space for a diverse audience to meet, relax, prepare for and reflect upon a shared experience. Foyers need to have an intuitive clarity of welcome, orientation and circulation and be capable of working throughout the rhythms of the day, absorbing swings of low and high occupancies, feeling charged and activated whatever the density. We pay particularly attention to ensure the foyer has a robust materiality that ages gracefully, has good acoustics tuned to ensure pleasant noise levels and intelligibility, and that, crucially, the lighting has a range of atmospheres from relaxed informal café to theatrically intensified pre show. We love spaces that can drop down to almost candlelit levels when the mood requires.

We work collaboratively with the theatre artistic and technical teams, specialist theatre consultants and suppliers to find the right balance of technical infrastructure with an eye on cost effectiveness and low energy solutions. For adaptive spaces, we love to explore an ‘intelligent manual’ approach to stage engineering: robust, intuitive, low tech, cost effective and artistically permissive rather than complex, over-automated, expensive and quickly obsolete.

Designing efficient, effective production spaces requires a deep understanding of theatrical making processes and sequences, and of the connections to performance and rehearsal stages. Production workshops are rare inner city creative ‘factories’ oozing magic and intrigue. Our experience has shown there is a huge public interest in connecting with these making processes, both from safe internal viewpoints and from views in from the street. Dressing rooms, rehearsal rooms, workspace have traditionally been rather neglected, utilitarian spaces. Because we have learned that a happy cast and a happy crew is a happy theatre, we give equal concentration to back of house space and take great pleasure in getting to know and engage with the full technical, costume, production, front of house and administration teams to tune the spaces to their working methods and to impart shared knowledge of new methods.

In addition to public facing auditoria and foyers many of our theatres include dedicated education, community and emerging talent spaces, enabling the organisations we work with to substantially expand their outreach programmes to the widest and most diverse audience. Spaces we have designed have included: writers hubs for new and emerging theatre makers, Clore learning spaces engaging all ages of the local community and shared workspaces to share skills, grow businesses and enable new connections. As conglomerate civic spaces we aim for our theatres to be available - and meaningful - to the whole community.

We are facing a planetary emergency which demands urgent and wide-ranging changes in all of our activities. Theatres will continue to be a crucial part of our collective public culturethe spaces where we can share stories of our common humanity in real time - but those spaces need to change, alongside the organisations and productions they support. We have world-leading knowledge and experience both of retrofitting old buildings to sustainable, contemporary performance use and of designing new theatre spaces that aspire to be a positive contributor to the living world. We champion the principles of regenerative design through advocacy, research and live projects and we are on track to design only zero whole life carbon buildings by 2030 in accordance with our public commitments. Beyond building design, we are embarking on transformative relationships with client organisations to embed regenerative practices throughout the performing arts.

Haworth Tompkins is one of the world’s leading theatre architects, with twenty-five years’ experience of theatre design and over 180 major awards including the RIBA Stirling Prize for the Liverpool Everyman. We are also one of the leading proponents of regenerative design, whereby architecture is considered as an indivisible component of self-sustaining and constantly evolving planetary life support systems. We are a founder and key driver of Architects Declare, now a 7500 strong multi-disciplinary network of built environment organisations in 28 countries advocating to build a safe and just space for humanity to thrive within ecological boundaries. We have re-engineered our business model and our ownership structure to those ends; we are an Employee Owned Trust and a Certified B Corporation. Our combined architectural, social and environmental ethos earned us the AJ100 Practice of the Year award in both 2020 and 2022.