The Egg is a new theatre for children, young people and their families, designed for the Theatre Royal Bath. The playful and intimate space, created within a Grade II listed Victorian building used latterly as a cinema, has been designed in creative response to a brief drawn up by a group of twenty 9-18 year olds, ensuring that it meets the needs of the very people it is intended to serve.
A theatre for children and young people
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Located on the corner next to the TRB's main theatre, the building houses the eponymous 'egg'-shaped auditorium, around which an arts cafe, rooftop rehearsal space and basement technical workshop are arranged. Applying experience garnered through previous theatre projects at The Royal Court, The Almeida Kings Cross, Gainsborough Studios and current work at The Young Vic, we created a flexible and dedicated space infused with a sense of playfulness, glamour and ownership by young people - all aspects made clear from the young client team's brief from the start. |
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Working within the external walls of the existing building, the original interior of which had been all but destroyed, the scheme employs an innovative structural solution to insert a tightly fitting elliptical 120 seat auditorium into the rectangular shell of crumbling bath stone. The raking steel structure avoids the existing historic building's foundations and respects its original fabric, whilst informing the auditorium's distinctive and intimate shape. |
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Clad in padded upholstery felt and corrugated red plastic sheeting, the structural presence of the auditorium is felt throughout the theatre, its form asserting itself down through the building and protruding though the ceiling of the ground floor cafe.
Mirroring the majesty of the TRB's main theatre but reinterpreting it for its young users, the egg steers clear of the black box studio approach to theatre design whilst achieving a high degree of flexibility.
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Circulation spaces wind around the central intervention from a street level cafe, crossing and re-crossing around the stone walls to reach the rooftop rehearsal room with panoramic views across Bath. Retaining the large existing windows with the addition of blackout shutters, the auditorium is unique in the UK enabling both fully day-lit or blacked out theatre and is usable end-on, in the round, flat floor and traverse.
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The original Bath stone skin of the building forms an important base ingredient in the scheme, against which a palette of brightly-coloured and textured contemporary materials play. We have retained marks of demolition and past life on the interior masonry, though augmented by new structural concrete repairs and openings wherever necessary, to contrast with new materials such as resin flooring, corrugated plastic sheet surrounding the auditorium, mirrored steel and felt. |
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Key to the young client team's brief was the theatre's outward impression and visibility. The young consultants formulated sophisticated ideas on the importance of physically communicating the theatre's activity to the outside. Interpreting this sense of exterior visibility, the translucent red corrugated plastic sheeting surrounding the auditorium not only creates a sense of interior intimacy but also has an important lightbox effect. Projecting coloured light through the facade to the exterior of the building, Haworth Tompkins has responded to the brief by creating the sense of a glowing ember of activity inside. |
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The inclusion of a cafe, designed as a specifically child and family-friendly space for users of the theatre, emanated directly from the young people in the consultant team, as a social space to encourage a sense of ownership and belonging.
Through ongoing dialogue throughout the design process with the consultant team and its young members and an excellent working relationship with the locally-based family contractor Emerys of Bath, the scheme injects a high degree of flexibility into a consciously small and intimate space, without sacrificing a crucial sense of place. |
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THE EGG, BATH
Client: Theatre Royal Bath.
Value £2,264,000
Completion 2005
RIBA Award 2006
Bath & North East Sommerset Building Control Design Quality Award 2005 |
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