The design organizes the program around an atrium, placing the theatre room upward, floating above a social space, moving all around the building, and establishing connections with all the outdoor spaces around the site. It combines all of the college's performing arts departments in a single building and provides them with a shared theatre. This 400-seat venue also functions as the main hall for the college.
Brighton College's performing arts centre forms part of a wider masterplan to revamp the campus, for which OMA created the School for Science and Sports.
Brighton College Performing Arts Centre by KRFT and NHA. Photograph by Stijn Bollaert.
Brighton College Performing Arts Centre by KRFT and NHA. Photograph by Stijn Bollaert.
Project description by KRFT
In the last 10 years, Brighton College has enriched its 19th-century campus with a series of new buildings, improving the facilities of this inner-city Independent School. It has understood the strong power of architecture to improve learning environments.
The College asked for an integral educational building in which all performance arts would take place, with a theatre hall as the heart of the building. The competition required a 3000 square meter building, including a 400-seat theatre hall, on a small site, in between the listed Gilbert Scott-designed Main Building and the soon-to-be-delivered Sports & Science building by OMA.
In it response, krft positioned the theatre hall upwards, floating above a multi-oriented social space, that moves around the building, making connections to all outdoor spaces surrounding the site. This emphasizes the building as a pivot point of all movement around the outdoor campus space and avoids any possible 'backsides' of the building on campus.
Brighton College Performing Arts Centre by KRFT and NHA. Photograph by Stijn Bollaert.
The studio spaces, positioned on an underground level, use their double height to capture daylight and views from the ground floor and lift the foyer space to the higher Home Ground level.
In its architecture, the building tries to bridge the monumental with the contemporary. The building rises as a white chalk cliff from the green campus space. A facade, mixing contemporary brickwork with traditional flint bridges again the different characters of the surrounding campus.
