OMA’s new home for Factory International in Manchester, a project that is the biggest investment since the Tate Modern, is finally complete.

Words
Jason Sayer

Photos
Marco Cappelletti

A typology now commonplace in cities is the ‘culture shed’. To name a few standouts, Lyon has ‘La Sucrière’ courtesy of Z Architecture (2003), Dunkirk has ‘FRAC’ designed by Lacaton Vassal (2011), Rotherham – of all places – has the Stirling Prize-winning ‘MAGNA Centre’ from WilkinsonEyre (2001), New York, through Diller Scofidio + Renfro, has the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin ‘Culture Shed’ (2019), London has just launched the ‘Drumsheds’ (2023), and now Manchester also has its very own: Aviva Studios, thanks to Dutch outfit, OMA.

The term ‘shed’ is commonplace in architecture discourse surrounding cultural venues, perhaps, in part, because people still love industrial chic and its juxtaposition with something new and design-y. The term infers an infrastructural quality too, as if, in the Corbusian sense, this typology is a machine for producing culture in. And in many ways, it is just that: a stripped down, bare bones means of facilitating as many cultural activities as possible.

Many who design such spaces refer to the work of Cedric Price, author of the never-built Fun Palace that boasted a framework of scaffolding among a myriad of adjustable apparatus to enable such a venue to play host to as many things as possible. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s original idea for the Centre Pompidou came close to this with the proposal of moving floors, while DS+R’s Culture Shed in Manhattan went as far as to put huge wheels on an ETFE canopy that could roll back and forth to expand the venue’s capacity as necessary. Hammering home the notion of industry, architect Liz Diller even described the Shed as “simply a piece of infrastructure”, adding that “it’s muscular and industrial, just meat and bones.”

So what of Manchester’s Aviva Studios? Lead by OMA partner Ellen van Loon, the project also has its eyes on maximum flexibility. The new home of Factory International – the institution that runs the biennial Manchester International Festival – Aviva Studios is not just a big deal for the North, but for the UK in general, being the largest investment in a national cultural project since the Tate Modern in 2000.

Left: a 1,600-seat auditorium in the Hall that comes with a flexible stage, adaptable to ballet, theatre, music, and cross-art performances.
Right: Two ‘Multiwalls’ enable the Warehouse to be configured as a single space or divided into two warehouse spaces.

Being such a big deal comes with quite a big price tag: £240m (the project’s original budget from 2015 was £110m). The naming rights were also sold off, hence the rather corporate ‘Aviva Studios’ as opposed to ‘Factory International’. But for all that comes a very big building, totalling 13,350 square metres across a 1.8-hectare site, and located between the River Irwell, a railway line, some Victorian warehouses and a pile of new-build housing blocks.

As you might’ve guessed, a lot has been programmed to take place here. Inside what’s known as the ‘Warehouse’, a theatre grid spanning 30-metres wide by 66-metres long allows it to be used for a wide range of performances and boast a standing capacity of 5,000. ‘Multiwalls’ – aka individual panels that are manually moved around a track – allow the area to be divided into two, if necessary, while 170 strong points, capable of holding 1 tonne, allow production rigs or event performers to be suspended from the walls and ceiling, from 21-metres up.

Homage to the Hacienda: designer Ben Kelly, the man behind the iconic graphics and colour palette of Manchester’s Hacienda has livened up the interior with an approach that harks back to the former iconic night club. Hazard stripes, boldly coloured furnishings tectonic elements distinguish the space. 

The Warehouse’s size has already been exploited, to critical acclaim: Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s You, Me and the Balloons saw the 94-year-old exhibit her work at a scale never seen before in the UK, garnering large crowds and a five-star review from ­The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones.

The other primary space is the ‘Hall’. Located adjacent to the Warehouse, it’s slightly smaller at 19-metres wide and 5.5-metres deep, offering a seated capacity of 2020, 640 of which is fixed seating on a balcony, with the rest being stalls that can be reconfigured as needed. A flexible stage facilitates ballet, theatrical and musical performances, with further activities possible through proscenium steel shutters that can fully open to let the stage run deeper into the building, as well as allow events to take place in the Hall and Warehouse at the same time.

Naturally there are social spaces, too. Outside, moveable seating can be dispersed for external events, while inside, a cafe-restaurant backs onto existing red brick arches, with this industrial feel maintained albeit in a more contemporary way through exposed services and rigging from which theatre lighting illuminates the space below. Other details, like a curtain and trolleys on wheels link notions of industry with notions of performance, allowing one to dream as if they were backstage. These details, among other more architectural flourishes, have given the OMA treatment (aided by designer Ben Kelly) and doused with bright colours, bringing the predominantly greyscale setting to life and serving as a homage to the Hacienda night club, once central to the UK clubbing scene.

When asked how to encompass and deal with such a broad range of activities in one site, van Loon remarked how OMA relished the opportunity. “In fact, it was our dream,” she said earlier this year. “[The brief] was very short – one sheet of A4 – but the client was asking for exactly what we’d always dreamt of building. It was a match made in heaven.”

Installation image from Manchester International Festival 2023 with Yayoi Kusama’s You, Me and the Balloons. Photo by David Levene.

The external expression of everything going on inside results in two shapes forced together: one giant concrete box and another, polyhedral metal addendum, angular in form a la Casa da Musica though lacking the panache. In a statement, OMA described how the building’s materiality reflects the industrial nature and heritage of the site. “The combination of exposed steel connections, raw concrete, and façade systems typically used on industrial buildings and factories are brought together to create a new interpretation of the materials, while retaining the industrial aesthetics.”

This is quite a far cry from 2015. OMA’s original plans (which you can view here) were tantalising and suggested an alluring composition of two far more delicate structures: one a glass box with a giant sliding glass frontage and the other, a more angular protrusion, covered in a white shroud. Huge stairs reached out the river’s edge which the building looked and opened up out to – a generous offer to the city.

But that didn’t happen. Brexit, the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have been blamed for the rising costs along with the alleged difficulty to the deliver the original design. Public space along the River Irwell seems yet to be fully realised, with a few of trees occupying a green patch just beyond the entrance. Indeed, OMA is more concerned about what can happen inside. “It is a space that can create multiple opportunities and endless configurations and environments,” said van Loon. “It will be a new type of performance space, a unique crossover between a fixed theatre and flexible warehouse.”

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