South Bank: Architecture & Design (eBook)

THE BUILDINGS

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL

Leslie Martin, Robert Matthew, Peter Moro et al, 1951

INTRODUCTION

The official guide book to the 1951 Festival of Britain suggests that its showcase South Bank concert hall ‘can claim to be a work of art in itself’.19 For many visitors to the Royal Festival Hall, both then and now, this is not an exaggeration. It is one of Britain’s most adventurous and innovative post-war public buildings, designed within a sophisticated modernist aesthetic, yet it managed to instantly seduce audiences while avoiding some of the criticisms levelled at certain mid-century contemporaries, as well as later additions to the South Bank. As a new performance space, with seating for around 3,000 people, it was widely regarded as a masterpiece, meeting its remit ‘as an example of modern English architecture at its best, and as a well-tuned instrument for orchestras and conductors of international repute’.20

The success of the Royal Festival Hall and its status as a landmark concert hall is all the more remarkable given the multiple challenges and constraints involved in its design and construction. Like the Festival of Britain itself, which took place around it, the Festival Hall was conceived and constructed against the clock. Yet, unlike all of the temporary exhibition pavilions that surrounded it on the southern shore of the Thames, the Festival Hall was always intended to be a permanent and long-lasting structure, forming the foundation of a new campus of the arts. Not only was the conception and completion of the building itself a race against time, but it was also built to a tightly controlled budget of £2 million at a time of continuing post-war austerity, when many building materials were still in short supply. And, although it offered important advantages, the riverside site itself needed to be stabilized with a new river wall, while remaining buildings on the site, such as the old Lion Brewery, were cleared away.

The Royal Festival Hall remains the lynchpin of a vibrant riverside neighbourhood that continues to evolve and grow.

Given all of these considerations, it was extraordinary how accomplished the resulting building was in almost every respect. Outwardly, the building was a sophisticated exemplar of the International Style, yet its detailing was always elegant and – at times – expressive, with the gentle curve of its riverside façade softening the largely linear outline. Inside, the level of refinement of so many bespoke ingredients and the characterful quality of the auditorium, in particular, were striking and much praised. Over the decades there have been adjustments, alterations and updates to the Royal Festival Hall, yet the unique personality of this landmark building has been respected and retained, ensuring that it remains a much loved focal point for the South Bank.

Art and sculpture have always played an important role in and around the Festival Hall, including Ian Walters’ Nelson Mandela statue (1982), above, and Reg Butler’s Birdcage (1951), opposite.

Colour, pattern and detailing all played an important part in the architectural design of the Festival Hall, as seen in its tilework, carpets and elegant wooden panelling.

CONTEXT

While the 1951 South Bank Exhibition as a whole came under the remit of the Festival of Britain’s director of architecture, Hugh Casson, and his team, the Royal Festival Hall was an exception. The concert hall project was run instead by the department of architecture at London County Council (LCC), headed by Robert Matthew and based at nearby County Hall. The LCC saw the Festival Hall as the first step in meeting their ambition of creating an original collection of new cultural institutions on the South Bank site and embraced the challenge of having the building ready in time for the Festival deadline, while also taking responsibility for its future running and long term upkeep.

Robert Matthew began drawing together a dedicated team to work on the Royal Festival Hall, with his role compared to that of a conductor leading an orchestra. In the autumn of 1948 he appointed architect Leslie Martin to serve as his deputy and to lead the Festival Hall design team, with Martin usually credited as the chief creative force behind the building. Martin had just turned 30 and, after teaching at the University of Hull, had spent much of the war overseeing the reconstruction of railway stations and vital infrastructure. This wartime service meant that Martin had experience of meeting complex logistical challenges yet he was also an intellectual, creative modernist with a love of the arts, making him well suited to his new post as Festival Hall team leader.

Another key member of the LCC group was architect Peter Moro, who was given responsibility for the interiors of the building. Born in Germany and partly educated in Switzerland, Moro had settled in England in 1936, working initially with Berthold Lubetkin’s Tecton and then becoming an influential tutor at the Regent Street Polytechnic, with a number of his former students later drafted into the LCC’s architecture department. He was well connected with the design world in general, helping to draw in other Festival Hall contributors such as the furniture designer Robin Day. Other members of the design team included Trevor Dannatt and the acoustics expert Hope Bagenal, while an experienced LCC architect, Edwin Williams, was in charge of managing the site and logistical planning.

DESIGN

The design of the Festival Hall was influenced by a number of factors and key concerns. Above all, the building needed to provide a state of the art concert hall capable of seating a large audience and hosting major events, including the opening programme for the Festival of Britain. A secondary performance space was also included in the original brief, but pressures on space within a constrained site inside the South Bank’s Festival quadrant meant that this was put on hold. The riverside location was, of course, another key consideration with the need to connect the building to the riverside setting and provide connections with the surroundings, partly through the provision of terraces and outdoor spaces around the Festival Hall. Importantly, there was the sense from the start that this was a communal building – or ‘people’s palace’ – and that, as well as the auditorium, it should offer other amenities, including restaurants and meeting places. The building also needed to be able to serve the practical needs of both orchestras and performers, as well as thousands of visitors, requiring functional service spaces and clear circulation routes. Beyond this, the Festival Hall was the centrepiece of a national celebration and needed to be in tune with the celebratory tone of the Festival of Britain as well as its optimistic, forward-looking narrative.

The design developed by Martin, Matthew and the LCC team has been summed up as the ‘egg in the box’ solution. Martin proposed floating the oval-shaped auditorium within the more or less linear outline of the building, using the spaces around the concert hall as an extra acoustic buffer that would help protect performances from any outside interference from crowds or passing trains running over nearby Hungerford Bridge. All the other ingredients of the building could then be arranged around the central auditorium over multiple levels.

‘The two entrance levels at the sides could be connected by a large foyer space which, with its associated restaurants, would occupy the site area,’ said Martin. ‘The auditorium with its heavy enclosing structure could be placed centrally over this within the main volume of surrounding foyers and galleries. And however incompletely it was realized, it was this central idea that provides the building with one of its main architectural attributes: the great sense of space that is opened out within the building, the flowing circulation from the symmetrically placed staircases and galleries which give access to all parts of the auditorium, the changing spatial volumes and views that are presented from these different levels and, within and enclosed by all this, the protected mass of the auditorium itself. That was the architectural conception as it was first envisaged and which we attempted to retain.’21

As Martin suggests, there were many benefits to the egg in the box solution beyond enclosing and protecting the central concert hall. Clear and welcoming circulation routes were established, leading up from the lower ground level through to the main foyer at upper ground level and then continuing upwards via the sweeping staircases either side of the auditorium, leading to the front stalls, mid stalls and balcony levels of the hall, as well as the amenities and services zones arranged around the performance space. While the hall itself was carefully set within a double-skinned concrete shell, with an additional cavity between them filled with sound insulation, the surrounding stairways and other parts of the Royal Festival Hall were lifted by the rich provision of natural light and a sense of open space and volume. The connections with the river were maximized, with banks of glass looking out towards the Thames and access to the adjoining terraces at upper ground level, connecting with the riverside promenade below. In many respects, the building was highly complex yet the architectural plan offered visitors to the Festival Hall a logical and...