The Young Vic
Haworth Tompkins
London 2006

The Young Vic was originally intended to be a temporary structure, and even retained an existing butcher’s shop as its entrance. That was back in 1970, when – at a cost of £60,000 – Bill Howell’s design was built on a bombsite in run-down Waterloo using breeze blocks. Even after 35 years, it still retained that temporary feel. Its auditorium was designed in line with Brechtian ideals of the theatre as a forum: a space where the audience is always aware that what it sees is a representation of reality rather than reality itself.

Over in the more refined climes of Sloane Square, Haworth Tompkins’ renovation of the Royal Court Theatre (2000) was an act of excavation. It pulled the Victorian building apart in order to show how the physical structure works, much as plays performed at the theatre had pulled apart the edifice of the British establishment in the 1960s.

The 2006 refurbishment of the Young Vic, also by Haworth Tompkins, was a different proposition altogether. David Lan, the theatre’s artistic director said that in contrast to the Royal Court, which is a young writer’s theatre, the Young Vic is a young director’s theatre and that should be acknowledged in the design – the making of theatre rather than a theatre structure was important.

Haworth Tompkins’ renovation retained the footprint and concept of the original auditorium: an octagonal seating arrangement inside a square box. However, it added hidden passageways to act as a backstage area. The height of the stage has been raised, making way for a new lighting grid and allowing the auditorium to extend above workshop space – newly built – so that an extended thrust stage could break the former auditorium perimeter. Not even the hallowed auditorium was allowed a sense of permanence.

Featuring three performance spaces, the Young Vic never feels like an institution. The building operates as a series of discreet yet interlocking spaces, each with its own texture and logic. On the exterior, the auditorium is clad with cement board panels, hand-painted by artist Clem Crosby, and then by an aluminium mesh. On the interior, it is the same black painted blockwork as before. The public foyer is formed from an inserted timber and steel structure, along with retained elements of the old butcher’s shop.

The exterior cladding and interior circulation are designed to tantalise the senses. Yet its inner core, where the imaginative act takes place, is blank. It’s an inversion of the preconceptions of theatre architecture. The team behind the Young Vic may have a messianic faith in the value of theatre, but it typified the decade by showing the rough glamour of the art form.

The use of a diverse material palette is one of the great defining characteristics of cultural buildings completed in Britain during this period. Sarah Wigglesworth championed this approach with the Siobhan Davies Dance Studios in London (2006), a beautiful renovation of a Victorian school whose cranked columns and suspended canvas ceilings prove the right of an architect to experiment.

Yet the sense of purpose to Haworth Tompkins’ collage approach at the Young Vic sets it apart. Much of the final fit-out was carried out by the theatre itself – constructed by set builders. David Lan and Steve Tompkins were wise enough to know that rather than diminishing the power of theatre, revealing the way theatre is made makes it all the more compelling.