Sadler’s Wells East
O’Donnell + Tuomey’s Sadler’s Wells East brings dance to diverse audiences and much-needed permanence and purpose to Stratford Waterfront.
Words
Isabel Allen
Photographs
Peter Cook
“We wanted to make a building that spoke of the site’s industrial past,” says Sheila O’Donnell. We are gazing at the saw-tooth roofline of Sadlers Wells East, a brand new theatre for dance and the latest addition to Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It’s a salutary reminder that this particular patch of East London enjoyed a long, proud history as a centre for making and manufacturing long before the ‘new neighbourhood’ was catapulted into the spotlight as the site of the 2012 Olympic Games. Before the frenzy of turbo-charged development fuelled by a heady combination of political ambition and plain showing off.
It’s hard to imagine a more potent monument to Boris Johnson’s tenure as Mayor of London than the cynically-but-not-so-catchily named ArcelorMittal Orbit, born out of a chance conversation between Johnson and ArcelorMittal’s Lakshmi Mittal. Despite Johnson’s confident assertion that the gargantuan steel squiggle would justify its existence as a major tourist attraction – a symbol of the city akin to the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower – Orbit (currently closed for refurbishment) quickly became synonymous with hasty decision-making, misguided shape-making, childish exhibitionism and bare-faced greed.
How, then, to right the wrongs of the past? To make sense of the detritus of a misguided past? To transform this lop-sided landscape of follies and grand projets into a functioning neighbourhood with authenticity and substance and lasting appeal? Charged with this seemingly impossible task the London Legacy Development Corporation’s (LLDC) held an international design competition, won in 2015 by a team led by Allies and Morrison and including O’Donnell + Tuomey, Arquitecturia Camps Felip, Buro Happold, Gardiner & Theobald and LDA Design.
View from one of the dance studios looking out towards two relics from the site’s previous incarnation as a pop-up global village for the 2012 Olympics: ArcelorMittal Orbit, designed by sculptor Anish Kapoor and engineer Cecil Balmond, and West Ham’s stadium, designed by Populous and originally built as the London Olympics Stadium.
In 2018 the team secured planning consent for the Stratford Waterfront masterplan – London’s newest cultural and education quarter – combining 600 new homes with associated retail and community space as well as a clutch of cultural buildings including new venues for the London College of Fashion, the Victoria & Albert Museum and BBC Music and O’Donnell + Tuomey’s newly completed Sadler’s Wells East.
For O’Donnell + Tuomey the fundamental challenge was to counter the area’s general air of transience with a building that, as John Tuomey puts it, “feels ancient; as though it’s been here for a long time, as part of the fabric of the town. There is a quite a lot of surface architecture around here. We wanted it to feel like it had a permanent sense of belonging to Stratford; a resolutely solid building, designed to last for a very long time.”
This ambition is most evident from Carpenter’s Road, to the north-east of the site, where the building reads as geological, as much as architectural; a monolithic brick mountain inspired by the ancient Aurelian walls that defend the city of Rome. Its primitive simplicity belies the fact that there are some sophisticated architectural games at play. Firstly, there are the bricks. As O’Donnell observes “a blank brick wall is very different from a blank concrete wall”. And these aren’t any old bricks. These are rough-hewn, hand-crafted Venetian bricks, selected for seductive tactility, and because the manufacturer was able to supply both brick and tiles made from the same purple-hued clay.
The character of the building is in keeping with the industrial past of the site, with saw-tooth studios enlivening the skyline, and walls and roofs are clad in brick and large tiles made from the same purple-hued clay. The flytower rises above the rest of the building, expressed as a singular element in brickwork and proudly displaying the illuminated Sadler’s Wells signage.
Then there is the matter of architectural form, which Tuomey characterises as a response to the question: “How do you make a building that is expressive of its function, without being blank to the world?” The solution was to express the ventilation towers, and the fly tower, and the runaround that forms a secret passage from one side of the stage to the other, to create what O’Donnell describes as “a kind of monumentality which wouldn’t have been possible without the manipulation of form” – a composition that is simultaneously inscrutable, and a literal representation of the functionality within.
Paradoxically, the desire to evoke the dignity and gravitas of ‘deep time’ went hand-in-hand with a determination to appeal to local audiences with a building that is welcoming, accessible, legible and bright. At its most literal, the instinct to ‘reach out’ is expressed in the words YOU ARE WELCOME emblazoned in neon letters at the building’s two entrances – one marking the arrival from Stratford Station and the other along the waterfront. Which is cute, though a purist might argue unnecessary if the architecture’s doing its job.
Open throughout the day, the free-flowing L-shaped foyer is a ‘public living room’ with cafe and bars. Deep concrete beams support the dance space above.
O’Donnell talks fondly of a ‘ten-year bar safari’, an ongoing series of visits to foyers across the world, taking notes on what makes a visitor feel welcome; what makes or breaks a civic space. Inspired by ‘civic-minded’ buildings on the South Bank – notably the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall, where visitors are welcome to turn up with laptops and settle in for a day’s work – they set out to design the foyer as a ‘public living room’.
“In the beginning we were asking ‘where will the box office go?’” she recalls. “But it turns out that’s not how it works anymore.” Staff need little more than a chair and somewhere to perch a laptop, allowing the foyer to be designed as a glazed free-flowing L-shaped gathering place populated with cafes, bars and free-standing furniture, which can be moved about at will.
A double-height entrance space is bridged by a link between the upper floor studios which allows dancers to look down on the foyer below. Weighty concrete beams give a rhythm to what would otherwise be a pretty amorphous space, and support the floor above. “You think dancers are very light and float in the air,” Tuomey observes. “But they need a lot of support.”
The foyer spills out onto outdoor performance space, and contains Dance Floor, a stage for use by artists and community groups; part of an eclectic approach to programming that is both inclusive and diverse. Learning and engagement programmes, including a new centre for choreographic practice and a hip hop theatre company, will offer opportunities for audiences, participants, artists and local communities. The relatively modest size of the performance spaces makes Sadlers’ Wells East an ideal space for hosting mid-size companies and trialling experimental work. Accordingly the programme spans what Sadler’s Wells artistic director, Alistair Spalding describes as “a kaleidoscope of dance styles” – hip hop, rave, rhumba, ballet…the list goes on.
Designed in consultation with Charcoal Blue, the main auditorium occupies almost half the volume of the building, and is a flexible space with a single of seating for an audience of 550. The dimensions of the stage are identical to Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington, to enable productions to transfer seamlessly from one venue to another. The stage area can be expanded by removing and retracting seats, allowing artists to create work for a variety of configurations.
Performance spaces are designed to be as flexible as possible. The opening programme will see the main auditorium, a 550-seat space designed in consultation with Charcoal Blue, in many different guises including a club dance floor, a skatepark, an immersive rave experience and a photography studio. Yet the plan itself is surprisingly simple. “One of the interesting things for us, as architects who had no experience of designing for dance, was that any studio that wasn’t rectilinear had been ‘squared up’ inside,” Tuomey explains. “If you’re in the business of pirouetting, you take your focus point from the centre of the wall.” The last thing you want is a fluid, amorphous shape. Ideally, each of the four walls should have a different finish – mirror, brick, glazing – to aid orientation. And the room itself needs to be square. Or rather rectangular – a square dance floor plus a couple of metres to one side to allow the choreographer to step back and observe.
It’s been a steep learning curve. “Sheila and I go to a lot of theatre, but we hadn’t been to too much dance.” Tuomey recalls. “Alistair said ‘you have to stop looking for that linear narrative’, so that’s what we did. And it’s been a great relief to the soul.” But there’s a clear sense that spiritual nourishment is very much subservient to the nitty gritty of delivering on the client’s aspiration for “a straightforward building, ready for work.”
“We spent ten years looking at performance spaces.” O’Donnell recalls. “We went to Belgium and Holland and France, and we saw some really terrible municipal theatres.” But they also acquired an appreciation of the practicalities of stage management and dance fuelled by input from Brussels-based choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who scrutinised every drawing, and on-going dialogue with the Sadlers Wells team. “We’ve worked with a lot of cultural groups who are building their first building, and there isn’t always the same consistency in the conversation.” Tuomey explains. “It’s been really helpful that we’ve been able to maintain the same team of architects and the same client team over the last ten years.”
Dance studios enjoy excellent temperature control and natural light, enhanced by the saw tooth roof design and enjoy views over the park. The largest of the six dance studios is located above the auditorium, separated by a storey-height acoustic insulation zone. Slightly bigger than the theatre stage, it includes lighting rig facilities to allow work to be developed and performed on site.
The result is an intensely practical building. Flexibility is key. The dimensions of the main stage and the fly tower mirror the dimensions of Sadler’s Wells’ Islington base, meaning productions can transfer seamlessly from one venue to another. Tall openings allow sets to come on and off stage without having to be turned on their side. The fast-paced programme means that many productions arrive for just a couple of days before moving on so it’s essential that sets can be installed and demounted with speed.
But there is a real sense that spectacle is subservient to the serious business of making a lasting piece of the city; a place for work and study as much as a performance space. Technical workshops and rehearsal rooms are awash with natural light. In each of the six studios, the requirement for sealed spaces with a uniform temperature is balanced by a single opening window, just big enough for a dancer to stick their head out and sniff the air, or to enjoy a sneaky cigarette.
Or to wonder at the surrounding cityscape. Oddball Olympic relics – Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit; Zaha Hadid’s London Aquatics Centre; Populous’ Olympic Stadium reincarnated as the home of West Ham. But a clutch of new buildings too. Allies and Morrison’s London College of Fashion, completed in 2023, and O’Donnell + Tuomey’s V&A East and Allies and Morrison’s BBC Music, both due to open within the next couple of years. The most intriguing spectacle all of is the transformation of a pop-up global village into a real and lasting place.
Jason Sayer2025-01-09T14:56:01+00:00
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Source: Architecture Today
