An architect’s view of Northern Ballet

Architect James Butterworth casts his appraising eye over the new Northern Ballet building in Leeds…

This week myself and other members of the Leeds Society of Architects had the pleasure of being given a tour around the new Northern Ballet building at Quarry Hill in Leeds. I don’t use the word pleasure lightly, this is a really great building!

The project designs started in the late 1990’s by Leeds based Architects Carey Jones, who gained the initial planning permission before the project was taken over by Jacobs, one of the world’s largest providers of building and construction services. After a long wait for all involved the project was opened last September. Finally the internationally renowned Northern Ballet and Phoenix Dance Theatre along with the Northern Ballet Academy have a fantastic new building to call home, the largest purpose built building for dance outside of London.

At a comparably modest £14m construction costs they get a lot for their money: From the outside the building is angular, predominantly covered in elongated horizontal dark grey cladding panels, punctuated with glazed areas and feature green protruding boxes. There are areas of overhangs and projections to the front elevation creating interest and drama to the aesthetics.

The building is entered from the street into a large glazed atrium used as an informal meeting, exhibition space and cafe. This space is light & airy and, to someone who has had very limited contact with the dance world, was very welcoming.

The main purpose of the building is the 7 large dance studios, including the largest in Europe. These all have specialist sprung floors, mirrors and dance bars as you’d expect but also have lots of natural light coming in from outside and some have large high level viewing windows from central circulation space. The 2 main studios can also be joined together to create a 230 seat theatre for performances with raised control room for light and sound.

Throughout the rest of the building there are several meeting rooms, offices, changing facilities for dances, wardrobe and health suite, including Jacuzzi!

What I liked most internally was the use of colour in the building, after looking at so many buildings with white walls and muted colour schemes it is great to see bold use of colour creating a vibrant interior (although the jury is still out on wallpaper choice in the main conference room).

From an environmental point of view the building also performs well gaining BREEAM Excellent which should keep the heating and cooling to a minimum despite some dancers only allowed to dance in the studios if they are over 21°C.

Ballet to some people has a reputation for being pretentious and unwelcoming to outsiders, this building is definitely not that and well worth stopping by for a coffee and a look around if you are in the area.

View more of James’ photos of the building on flickr.