Battersea Arts Centre, 2018

Since 1974, Battersea Town Hall has been home to one of the most important incubators of new performance work in the UK. Haworth Tompkins worked here intensively alongside the Battersea Arts Centre team, the local community and theatre artists for over a decade. Seeking to reinvent the conventional supplier/consumer model of architectural practice, a number of jointly-improvised, non-invasive alterations were originally made alongside specific productions - such as Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death - to test strategies for change and to evolve a playful but rigorous architectural language. A brief for more permanent work was then developed, including the creation of a new courtyard performance space in a disused light well and the conversion of unused attics and rooftops for offices and a garden. Cumulatively the entire interior has been rennovated to allow multiple, interconnected performances, heritage spaces and community uses. In 2015 we were commissioned to rebuild the building’s Grand Hall after a shocking fire that partially destroyed it. The former decorative plaster vault was the starting point for a new timber grid ceiling, allowing far greater theatrical possibilities. The surfaces of the walls of the hall and its surrounding corridors have been preserved in their extraordinary, almost Pompeiian post-fire state.

“Haworth Tompkins have been superb partners through the process. Steve’s design work integrates the vision of the client and his own passion for space, not as an abstract artistic object but as a living, breathing, functioning body that seeks to connect with its inhabitants. Steve’s whole team have brilliantly delivered, always going the extra mile to realise a project as imagined.” David Jubb