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Architecture - The Bridgewater Hall
Manchester's prestigious international concert hall opened in September 1996 and since its opening has continued to receive plaudits from artists and audiences alike for its stunning design and marvellous acoustic.
In March 1998, The Bridgewater Hall was named winner of a Civic Trust Special Award, given for the new building which has done the most to enhance the appearance of a city centre. The judges praised the Hall for making 'a magnificent statement on the role of music in the cultural life of Manchester and contributing a new focal point to the city. The Hall also received an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects in November 1998.
'Built to Music', a full-colour 96-page book of Len Grant's photographic documentation of the construction of The Bridgewater Hall is available in hardback from The Bridgewater Hall and selected bookshops, price £19.95.
Copies are available by mail order from The Bridgewater Hall Shop: please send
a cheque made payable to The Bridgewater Hall for £19.95 + £3.00 postage
& packing to Sharron Matthews, The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester M2 3WS.
You can also e-mail your order to sharron@bridgewater-hall.co.uk
Facts and Figures
Address
The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester M2 3WS
Construction
Manchester City Council
Funded by
Central Manchester Development Corporation European Regional
Development Fund
Architects
Renton Howard Wood Levin
Acousticians
Arup Acoustics
Builders
Laing North West
Operating Company
The Bridgewater Hall is managed by Hallogen Ltd, a joint venture company
between Hallé Concerts Society and SMG
Work Commenced
March 22 1993
Hall Opened
11 September 1996
Building Weight
22,500 tons
Auditorium Capacity
Fixed Seating of 2341 on 4 levels:
Stalls 704
Choir Circle 160 (Choir Seats 276)
Circle 597
Gallery 604 includes 16 wheelchair seats available over 4 levels
Stage Size
19m wide at front tapering to 12.3m at the rear
12.8m deep
A rare and visionary gesture
The Bridgewater Hall was officially opened by Her Majesty The Queen accompanied by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, on Wednesday 4 December 1996. With the opening of this magnificent venue, Manchester's civic and cultural history entered a dramatic new phase. This great city, cradle of the Industrial Revolution and prodigy of the nineteenth century, has survived late-twentieth century industrial decline to re-invent itself for the new millennium with a confidence others must envy. For over 150 years it has had an unrivalled tradition of fine civic building, of architectural and artistic patronage and of amateur and world-class professional music-making. The Bridgewater Hall continues and consolidates these traditions, as well as being a prestige flagship for Manchester's overall regeneration and a splendid symbol of its artistic health and enterprise.
The need for a concert hall, purpose-built to the highest international standards, had been felt almost since the 1950's, when the Free Trade Hall, best-loved memorial of Manchester's 'golden age of manufacture', was reconstructed after wartime damage. Notwithstanding the deep affection in which it was held and with which it will always be remembered, the Free Trade Hall was hopelessly ill-equipped to respond to the ever-rising standards of service and acoustic excellence being demanded by the concert-going public and musicians alike.
During the 1970s and '80s several schemes and solutions were proposed. Despite Manchester's cultural vigour, they were all doomed to remain mere aspirations until imaginative partners could be found to help fund and execute such an enormously complex and expensive enterprise. The creation in 1988 of the Central Manchester Development Corporation provided the missing ingredient; an organisation which could match the City Council's vision and energy and which could act as the catalyst for a viable and unique financial solution. This partnership would not only give the City the concert hall it deserved and had earned, but would also stimulate the regeneration of the whole G-Mex area.
In 1989 a competition was held, to a brief devised by a representative group of Manchester's major musical organisations. The eventual winners, architects RHWL, distilled from their unrivalled experience as designers of buildings for the performing arts a wonderfully simple and elegant concept which relates well both to the overall fabric and texture of the City and to its immediate historic surroundings. The design of the building was informed at every stage by acoustic considerations and a large part of the building's success is due to the real creative collaboration between the architects and acousticians, Arup Acoustics.
In early 1993, after the design had been considerably refined and many difficulties overcome, the building contract was awarded to Laing North West. On March 22nd, excavators took their first slice through two hundred years of history. Where once there had been open fields crossed by a long-since vanished tributary of the River Tib, successively followed by dye-works, chemical factories, a bus station and a car park, The Bridgewater Hall rose in exactly three and a half years.
Construction
Unusually, The Bridgewater Hall is neither concrete- nor steel-framed, but is mostly formed from solid, reinforced concrete, moulded and cast like some vast sculpture. This gives it enormous density and mass - an acoustic ideal - and for more than a year the contractor's main activity was shuttering, reinforcing and pouring more than 2,500 loads of concrete.
Above the auditorium is a most remarkable roof, an engineering triumph which is, literally, the crowning glory of the building. It has three separate layers, the most substantial being the middle one; the massive ceiling of concrete-covered steelwork which spans the concert hall between pairs of tall, slim columns. Its intricate shape is a vital ingredient in the acoustic perfection of the space and every concrete slab is subtly twisted to diffuse sound effectively in the upper parts of the hall. Too wide and substantial to be self-supporting, it is held in place by the bottom layer; a tensioning system of struts and tie-rods hanging into the auditorium like some inverted suspension bridge. Despite its visual impact, this inner steelwork is acoustically 'invisible' and has no influence on the quality of the sound.
Above the concrete ceiling, a huge acoustic void houses technical systems and winches for lowering the chandeliers. Higher still is the third, outer layer; a light steel framework supporting acoustic panels covered externally with thin sheets of reflective, highgrade stainless steel - relatively new as a roofing material, but lighter and infinitely more durable than lead, its traditional equivalent. The soffits are gently illuminated at night, creating the illusion that the roof hovers, magically weightless, above the building.
To ensure that the Hall's carefully designed acoustic remains cocooned from all outside noise and vibration, the entire structure floats free of the ground on almost three hundred, earthquake proof isolation bearings. These sets of mighty steel springs ensure that there is no rigid connection between the 22,500 ton building and its foundations. In the Hall's undercroft, a forest of foundation columns, each capped with a cluster of spring units, create a mysterious silent world as compelling and dramatic as any of The Bridgewater Hall's more public spaces.
Plant tower
All the Hall's major services are routed through this extraordinary space, ensuring that neither their performance, maintenance or repair interferes with the acoustic isolation of the auditorium. On top of this, all the systems likely to generate noise or vibration - pumps, boilers, chillers and air-handling plant - are housed in a completely detached plant tower, again ensuring that no unwanted sound reaches the auditorium.
This eight storey, concrete-framed structure is connected to the building by two massive air ducts and its curved glass facade exposes the technical systems contained within it, revealing its function for all to see. By night, however, it also reveals its other function - that of a 'Tower of Time'.
As well as being a fundamental part of the Hall's acoustic design, the plant tower is also the building's most visible work of art, behaving as an abstract public clock. Lighting architect Jonathan Spiers has devised a scheme to creatively light the tower, using coloured light to paint it in changing colours that represent a hierarchy of different time intervals.
A gradually changing wash of light depicts the season and lines of argon accentuate the five glazed levels, representing the days of the week from Monday to Friday. At weekends, specially programmed colour changes depict the Saturday night social whirl and on Sundays, the oasis of calm before the week begins again.
Artworks
In conscious emulation of the past, the creation of The Bridgewater Hall was rightly seen as an opportunity to commission important, contemporary works of art and three significant artists collaborated closely with the architects in order to create pieces that were integral and complementary to the building.
On the piazza, poised above the canal basin, is a polished, Carrara marble monolith by Kan Yasuda, made in his workshop at Pietrasanta in Italy. Yasuda's work is Japanese in its sensitivity yet European in its sense of architectural form, the play of light on the burnished surface suggesting an intense life in the marble which it cannot naturally possess. It is an object for intense contemplation - a moment of meditative silence in the heart of the city.
Deryck Healey's new sculpture is essentially dynamic. Rising through four floors of foyers behind the glazed prow above the entrance of the building, it derives its inspiration from Manchester's central role in the history of the textile industry; billowing metal ribbons, like fabric frozen into stillness or unseen waves of sound, unfurl and develop like music and throw a lyrical wash of reflected colour onto the wall behind.
Kate Egan created a series of twenty-six exquisite textile banners which hang beside and in front of the windows of the Barbirolli and Charles Hallé Rooms. Her 'Space Pieces' take the patterns of the cosmos as their starting point, but also make abstract reference to the rhythmic language of music. They are a piquant mixture of traditional embroidery techniques and surprising contemporary materials.
Auditorium
The Bridgewater Hall auditorium is surprisingly warm and intimate for a hall seating nearly 2400 people. Nothing quite like it has ever been attempted before; a unique synthesis of two well-established designs, the 'shoebox' and the 'vineyard'. Shoebox halls are rectangular, flat-sided and acoustically marvellous, represented in this Hall by the rows of slender columns supporting a flat, coffered ceiling. Vineyard halls place the audience in smaller, friendly groups close to the musicians, and in The Bridgewater Hall the seating is carefully tiered to draw everyone as closely as possible around and into the performance.
Within the auditorium, every aspect of its design has been informed by the acoustic requirements of the space; the balcony fronts, the specially designed seats, the undulations of wall and floor. The colours are delicate at the lower levels - ochre, buff and silver-white - but rich and subtly modulated above, shifting from deep aubergine behind the Gallery to terracotta above the orchestra platform. The gleaming bronze handrails and door edgings bring a precious, jewel-like quality to the atmospheric and expectant silence.
The roof above the auditorium is an epic architectural statement, with the breathtaking engineering work of its cast iron roof structure a homage to Manchester's industrial past. Woven between the rigid struts of the steel roof structure, a galaxy of chandeliers create a wave of light which cascades down to the platform from a point high above the uppermost seating tier.
Organ
(For further information see the Organ section of this site.)
The visual impact of the auditorium climaxes in the spectacular façade of the organ, an instrument more completely integrated into the architectural and spatial composition of the space than in any other hall yet built. This remarkable £1.2 million pipe organ was designed and built by Marcussen's, a Danish family-owned company, whose traditional working methods have scarcely changed since they were established in 1806. Every joint in the massive wooden carcass was cut by hammer and chisel, and the swell boxes and casework are as beautifully crafted as hand-made furniture.
Taking three years to design and build and eighteen weeks to voice - the process which ensures that the pipes in each rank speak with the same 'family accent' - The Bridgewater Hall organ is a major work of art and technology, More than 42 feet high and 45 feet wide, it weighs a mighty 22 tons. With 76 stops, a battery of Trompettes en Chamade, 5,500 pipes of tin and lead, copper and pine ranging in size from 2 inches to 32 feet in length (the largest weighs over 300 pounds) this splendid instrument is destined to become one of the great recital organs of northern Europe.
Exterior
Externally, The Bridgewater Hall takes its cue from the warm colours and textures of nineteenth century Manchester, presenting itself to the street as a building of fiery stone and metal. Standing on a generous plinth of sandstone, and anchored by a thin, dark line of polished granite where the land falls away to the new canal and basin, the upper floors are cliffs of quietly-detailed metal cladding between cataracts of glass. Rising clearly through all this is the bold volume of the auditorium, sheathed in glorious, shining limestone and crowned with its 'floating' steel roof. The whole building stands at a provocative angle to Lower Mosley Street, its axis pointing proudly toward Albert Square, as if to emphasise its place in the cultural life of the whole city.
Interiors
Inside, the planning of the building is impressively clear, public at the front, private at the back; noisy and bustling on the side facing the road, calm and reflective above the canal. On every level, two grand doorways of flamed bronze in patinated bronze surrounds are set in the limestone walls, signalling the way to the auditorium. To reach them one must cross the foyers, where pure white walls, cool stone, limpid light and carpets blue as a chain of inviting lakes, form a minor 'rite of passage' before entering the expectant silence of the auditorium.
The achievement and splendour that is The Bridgewater Hall would be a rare and visionary gesture in any age, but rarer still in the closing years of the twentieth century. Manchester's concert hall has been designed, built, engineered and crafted to last; a secular temple to the art which gives voice to humanity's highest aspirations. It ought perhaps to be thought of as the first triumphant gesture of a new millennium.