Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Suffolk was presented at the AT Awards live finals on 7 November 2022 at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health to a jury comprising, Marion Baeli, Sarah Allan, Deyan Sudjic, Roger Harrabin, Ben Derbyshire, and Chair Catherine Burd. Read about how the project has stood the test of time, below.
Unpretentious agro-industrial buildings originally designed for making malt have been repurposed as space for the enjoyment of music and the arts. Credit: Peter Cook/View
Penoyre & Prasad’s reworking of Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Suffolk comprises a series of well-judged and skilfully implemented interventions. These range from the radical, such as lifting the roof of the old malt store and inserting a floating floor that is acoustically separate from the concert hall, to the pragmatic, including reducing changes of level, installing new lifts, and equalising men’s and women’s toilets. The main challenge was working out how to add around 600 square metres of additional accommodation without going outside the site curtilage, and while retaining the compositional quality of the concert hall complex.
One of the most innovative environmental measures has been the introduction of cooling into the concert hall ventilation system using water extracted from a borehole on the edge of the site. The 3600-litre sprinkler tank was given a dual purpose, serving also as the reservoir for the borehole water.
The project’s long-term success is evident in the way that it has been able to accommodate great intensity of use, as well as changes in programming and in the use of the facilities beyond their role as serving performances. Audiences and artists continue to appreciate its simple functional elegance, but the spaces are now used not just by concertgoers but by everyday visitors.
The project has demonstrated how repurposing existing buildings – an approach which, at the time, still tended to be thought of as second best – could provide an inexhaustible supply of meaningful space for new uses and that the results could be as good, if not better, than building from scratch. It was also influential in showing how to develop projects that are a hybrid of old and new, not by copying existing buildings, but by understanding their essence.
