Haworth Tompkins have completed a new Performing Arts Centre for The Perse School in Cambridge. Peter Hall, naturally ventilated throughout, includes a 400 seat auditorium, an adaptable foyer space, and full back of house facilities. The Perse School has an extensive programme of music and drama activities which had outgrown its previous facilities. The Performing Arts Centre is named after Peter Hall, who was a pupil at the school from 1941-1949. He went on to be the director of the National Theatre, an institution with which Haworth Tompkins has a long association.
Photography: Fred Howarth
This new center includes a 400 seat auditorium, an adaptable foyer space that incorporates a large, daylit rehearsal and teaching room, an exhibition space and full back of house dressing rooms, workshop and ancillary spaces, along with a suite of classrooms. The triple-height, galleried foyer with a ?diagrid? timber roof structure, is naturally daylit and overlooks a landscaped courtyard which will form the new heart of the school.
Space operates as a café for pupils and staff during the school day, and as a foyer for audiences during events in the auditorium. Spanning the full width of the courtyard, the highly glazed foyer allows views in and out of the building and blurs the boundary between interior and exterior.
Photography: Fred Howarth
A specially commissioned textile artwork is by Glasgow-based artist Victoria Morton, who worked with the pupils and explored the school archiv...