Posted by mdp on May 11, 2002 at 12:54:06:postscript: although the Royal Festival Hall was not strictly an integral part of the South Bank Exhibition, it has since been recognised as being part of 'Festival' architecture, so the following two captions have been added to complete the picture:
The only permanent legacy of the Festival of Britain's South Bank complex, the Royal Festival Hall, has proved one of the country's best and most-loved post-war buildings. That this is so is a tribute to its young, relatively inexperienced, design team who had to work at great speed against a backdrop of severe materials' shortages and bad weather. The hall is important, therefore, not just for its design qualities and its status as Britain's first major public building to be designed wholly in the modern idiom, but also for its production process which placed a new emphasis on teamwork and a more technocratic approach to building. Design work began in 1948 and continued as building progressed to fulfil a brief which called for a large concert hall for 3,000 people with a smaller twin (soon abandoned) together with restaurant, meeting rooms and exhibition gallery. The hall was thus envisaged not just as a concert space but as a social centre, and the problem was to accommodate all these functions on a restricted site. ( J. Leslie) Martin's* solution as ingeniously to raise the auditorium on a series of circular, reinforced concrete columns, leaving the foyers free to sweep underneath, and so create a dramatic interplay between the auditorium's solid mass and the light, transparent treatment of the surrounding elements. This was the 'solid egg in the transparent box' which gave the hall its remarkable sense of spatial dynamism and its ability to appear at once monumental yet informal.
* of the London County Council Architects Department, together with Robert Matthew, Peter Moro, Edwin Williams.
The hall is notable throughout for its carefully considered detailing masterminded by Moro with the assistance of designers such as Robin Day who was responsible for the seating. The underlying rationale of Martin's design was emphasized by differing decorative treatments, the dark Derbyshire marbles of the auditorium's outer walls, for example, being set off against the the cool, bright colours of the circulation areas. These were in turn contrasted with the rich warm hues inside the auditorium. The shoebox shape of the well-lit auditorium was determined by acoustical requirements worked out after extensive scientific testing by Hope Bagenal with Bill Allen and P H Parkin of the Building Research Station. The cantilevered boxes, reminiscent of the balconies at Highpoint 1 (1935) by Tectron, for whom Moro had briefly worked, were disparagingly compared to drwaers hurriedly pulled out in a burglary, but did not fulfil an acoustical function by breaking up the walls' flat planes. The acoustics were judged god if rather dry. Less good was the paucity of backstage accommodation, scheduled for completion in 1953, but only eventually provided during the a massive and insensitive remodelling in the 1960's which also saw the frontage recased and extended towards the river. Recent alterations have attempted to undo some of the damage caused to the original conception, but the status of the hall as an icon of post-war idealism and civic service remains unchanged.
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