This article needs additional citations for verification .(October 2013) |
Address | 90, York Way London |
---|---|
Designation | Grade A Commercial |
Type | Classical / Contemporary music, Arts / Cultural venue, Spoken Word, commercial office space, restaurant |
Capacity | Hall 1: 415 seats Hall 2: 200 seats |
Construction | |
Opened | 2008 |
Architect | Dixon Jones |
Website | |
www |
Kings Place is a building in London's King's Cross area, providing music and visual arts venues combined with seven floors of office space. It has housed the editorial offices of The Guardian newspaper since December 2008 and is the former headquarters of Network Rail and CGI.
Kings Place was a commercial development providing 26,000 sq. m of office space. Construction on the site began in 2005 and was completed in summer 2008; the opening festival started on 1 October 2008. [1] In late 2008 the building became the home for The Guardian and The Observer newspapers.
Kings Place houses the first public concert hall to be newly built in central London since the completion of the Barbican Centre concert hall in 1982. (Cadogan Hall and LSO St Luke's were adapted from old buildings in that period.)
It has a range of facilities for performance, exhibition and education. The music, arts and restaurant areas are arranged around public spaces which form a central hub to the building. The arts facilities include free access to a range of commercial art galleries. Kings Place is home to Aurora Orchestra as its resident orchestra, and also regularly hosts a number of other artistic associates including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and London Sinfonietta. The opera company OperaUpClose announced that it would move from its present Islington pub location, the King's Head, to Kings Place in 2015. [2]
Kings Place Music Foundation is the charity set up to run the music spaces at Kings Place. Gifted with the performing and back-of-house spaces on a long lease for a peppercorn rent, KPMF aims to deliver a very rich and busy music programme financed by ticket sales and the hire of the Kings Place facilities for rehearsals, recordings and conferences.
The charity works in partnership with music and arts organisations to offer a range of learning and participation activities to the local community and to the wider public. Activities began before the construction of the building finished and are growing steadily year by year.
KPMF offers access to creative spaces and activities for both new and established audiences with affordable prices for all. The KMPF music programme is funded entirely by revenue from ticket sales and income generated through event and conference hire, and without reliance on public funding.
Kings Place sits on the east side of York Way, 150 metres from King's Cross/St Pancras train stations. On its eastern side the building overlooks Battlebridge Basin on the Regent's Canal which is also home to many residential boats and the London Canal Museum.
Central St Martins, one of the art colleges within the University of the Arts London, brought a major visual arts community into the area from mid-2011, when it moved into the nearby Argent's 67-acre (270,000 m2) King's Cross Central development.
Following a limited architectural competition, Dixon Jones was appointed as the architect for Kings Place. The brief was for it to be a large building of far higher quality than the normal spec office development. The building was to be durable, not only in terms of quality of the build materials, but in its design. It had to be spatially generous and environmentally impeccable. Most importantly, it had to fit into a local urban architecture which is not uniform in scale.[ citation needed ]
The building has wavy glass runs along the west-facing York Way frontage; this three-layered glass façade is a free-standing transparent surface made up of hundreds of very slightly curved sheets of glass. As well as reducing heat gain from the afternoon sun and increasing wind resistance, the glass wall provides Kings Place with a distinctive facade.
Hall One, the main concert hall, is a separate structure within the building, it is a box that sits on rubber springs to give it complete acoustic separation from the rest of the building.
It is built to a regular geometry, a double cube, that is considered most successful for small concert halls. Structural columns around the hall are set away from the walls to allow curtains to be drawn between the columns and the walls to modify the acoustics for speech or amplified music.
It won the "Commercial and Public Access" award and the overall "Gold Award" in the 2009 Wood Awards. [4]
The architecture of Hall One emerged from a collaboration between Dixon Jones and Arup's acousticians. As part of the research that preceded the design, the developer, the architects, the engineers and the project manager visited Japan to look in detail at a dozen concert halls. The aim was to differentiate very precisely between a variety of modern concert halls and to examine what solution would best meet the requirements of Kings Place. Next a computer model of the proposed Kings Place auditorium was made. This was tested against computer models of the Concertgebouw, the Wigmore and several other halls. In this way it was possible to optimise the design for Hall One before construction began.
The oak veneer inside Hall One has come from the same 500-year-old German oak tree named Contessa. After felling the wood was cut into 5-metre lengths and boiled at 80 °C for one week, then sliced. The tree produced an acre of wood veneer. It has been used in Hall One to cover the panels, columns, roof coffers, the back of seats, and doors.
The Rotunda Restaurant spans the area of the building facing Regent's Canal and Battlebridge Basin. The Rotunda Bar features a curved bar that mirrors the shape of the building. The Green & Fortune Café is housed in the central atrium of the building on the ground floor level. Green & Fortune is responsible for all food, drink, and hospitality at Kings Place.
All seven levels above ground at Kings Place are commercial office space. From some angles Kings Place can be seen as four joined but separate structures. This breaking down of the mass of the building was critical to the planners and has allowed light and a sense of openness to penetrate to basement level. Thanks to a series of linking bridges, however, each of the upper floors is experienced by the office user as a very large contiguous plate.
For the office users no staircase was provided for general use so the only way to access above ground floors is via the lifts. This makes for inconvenience when the lifts break down and reduces the green impact of the building. The two common staircases have been designed so as only to be available in case of fire.
Kings Place promotes discovery of the arts in its surrounding boroughs of Islington and Camden. The Kings Place outreach programme works in three areas: Education, Community Engagement and Participation and Family. Music and arts organisations resident and performing at Kings Place offer educational classes, workshops, opportunities for participation in performances as well as family events. Past events and projects have included family drumming workshops and professional development sessions with the London Sinfonietta and their visiting musicians from the Ugandan Dance Academy and a visual arts project with local schools and the Visual Learning Foundation using the construction of the building as inspiration.
King's Cross is a district in the London Boroughs of Camden and Islington, located on either side of Euston Road, in the outskirts of north London and central London, England, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) north of Charing Cross. It is bordered by Barnsbury to the north, Clerkenwell to the southeast, Angel to the east, Holborn and Bloomsbury to the south, Euston to the west and Camden Town to the northwest. It is served by two major rail termini, St Pancras and King's Cross. King's Cross station is the terminus of one of the major rail routes between London and the North.
The Royal Festival Hall is a 2,700-seat concert, dance and talks venue within Southbank Centre in London, England. It is situated on the South Bank of the River Thames, not far from Hungerford Bridge, in the London Borough of Lambeth. It is a Grade I listed building, the first post-war building to become so protected. The London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the London Sinfonietta, Chineke! and Aurora are resident orchestras at Southbank Centre.
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall is a concert and arts venue located in Glasgow, Scotland. It is owned by Glasgow City Council and operated by Glasgow Life, an agency of Glasgow City Council, which also runs Glasgow's City Halls and Old Fruitmarket venue.
Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall is the concert hall component of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center in San Francisco, California. The 2,743-seat hall was completed in 1980 at a cost of US$28 million to give the San Francisco Symphony a permanent home.
Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) is Wales' national arts centre located in the Cardiff Bay area of Cardiff, Wales. The site covers a total area of 4.7 acres (1.9 ha). Phase 1 of the building was opened during the weekend of 26–28 November 2004 and phase 2 opened on 22 January 2009 with an inaugural concert.
The Queen's Hall was a concert hall in Langham Place, London, opened in 1893. Designed by the architect Thomas Knightley, it had room for an audience of about 2,500 people. It became London's principal concert venue. From 1895 until 1941, it was the home of the promenade concerts founded by Robert Newman together with Henry Wood. The hall had drab decor and cramped seating but superb acoustics. It became known as the "musical centre of the [British] Empire", and several of the leading musicians and composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries performed there, including Claude Debussy, Edward Elgar, Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss.
Warwick Arts Centre is a multi-venue arts complex at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. It attracts around 300,000 visitors a year to over 3,000 individual events embracing all types of theatre and performance, contemporary and classical music, dance, comedy, visual art, films, talks and family events. Warwick Arts Centre is the largest arts centre in the Midlands, and the largest venue of its kind in the UK outside the Barbican Centre in London.
Southbank Centre is a complex of artistic venues in London, England, on the South Bank of the River Thames.
Strathmore is a cultural and artistic venue and institution in North Bethesda, Maryland, United States. Strathmore was founded in 1981 and consists of two venues: the Mansion and the Music Center.
The Scratch Orchestra was an experimental musical ensemble founded in the spring of 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton.
St Luke's is a historic Anglican church building in central London, and in the London Borough of Islington. It served as a parish church from 1733 to 1959. It was designed by John James and Nicholas Hawksmoor, and is a Grade I listed building.
The Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music is the music and performance arts school of Northwestern University. It is located on Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, United States.
The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota, hosts a variety of performing arts, such as touring Broadway musicals, orchestra, opera, and cultural performers, and produces local musicals. It is home to several local arts organizations, including the Minnesota Opera, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and The Schubert Club. The president and CEO, Christopher Harrington, has served since November 2021, and Producing Artistic Director Rod Kaats has been with the Ordway since February 2018.
The Rialto Center for the Arts is an 833-seat performing-arts venue owned and operated by Georgia State University and located in the heart of the Fairlie-Poplar district in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. The venue is home to the Rialto Series, an annual subscription series featuring national and international jazz, world music, and dance. The Rialto also routinely presents Georgia State University School of Music performances, the annual National Black Arts Festival, and many others.
The Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts is a performing arts center located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. It houses the 756-seat Helen Bader Concert Hall, large rehearsal spaces, meeting facilities, music offices, and dance studios for the UWM Peck School of the Arts. The Zelazo Center is one of many facilities maintained by the Peck School of the Arts, including the Fine Arts Building, as well as Kenilworth Square East.
The Shanghai Oriental Art Center, abbreviated SHOAC, is one of the leading performance and cultural facilities in Shanghai. The five interconnected hemispherical halls or "petals" are shaped to resemble a butterfly orchid from above. They comprise the Entrance Hall, the Concert Hall, the Opera Hall, the Performance Hall, and the Exhibition Hall. The high-tech ceiling changes color during the night to reflect the nature of the performances inside. Located off Century Avenue in Pudong, the SHOAC was opened with a New Year's Eve concert in 2004 and officially opened on July 1, 2005.
Aberdeen has been the host of several theatres and concert halls through history. Some of them have been converted or destroyed over the years.
The Center for the Performing Arts (CPA) building is the largest building of the Miami University College of Creative Arts. It houses the Miami University Theater, theater department, and music department. Originally these programs were distributed between Fisher Hall and Hall Auditorium, and were moved to CPA after its construction in 1969.
Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall is a historic 900-seat Richardsonian Romanesque performance hall at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. It is home to both the Princeton University Orchestra and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra.
Lancaster Arts at Lancaster University (LA) is Lancaster University's public arts organisation. The organisation presents performances, for the public, staff and students, through its campus venues the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster Concerts Series and the Peter Scott Gallery.