Written by Levitt Bernstein Associates Ltd
Colston Hall’s new foyer completes the first step in the transformation of Bristol’s premier music venue from a tired municipal concert hall into one of the UK’s leading music performance centres.
The design attempts to remedy the problems of the site’s peripheral location by creating a local landmark which can be clearly identified within a densely developed part of the city.
The principal cladding material is a copper alloy shingle chosen to respond to the brief for a bold and visible building, and its gold colour has a tonal relationship with the beige and red bricks of the adjoining buildings.
Just as the timber internally resonates with the string instruments of an orchestra, the copper shingles evoke the brass section, with constant variations of light enhanced by the curved geometry of the building form.
The malleable nature of the material is expressed in the detail of the shingles, which are peeled back to form gill-like openings to ventilate the plant rooms.
The windows recall the punched holes of an old music roll or the texture of encoded data on a CD, and have a relationship to the shingle size, being multiples of a 300mm module, based on the rhythms denoted by musical time signatures; and there is also the hint of a graphic representation of a sheet of music.
These ideas have provided a framework for an apparently random pattern of window openings which increase in scale as they move from the private functional parts of the building to the public spaces that face towards the centre of Bristol.
Specialist copper contractor: Richardson Roofing (Company) Ltd
Main contractor: Willmott Dixon
