London Development Agency is the primary financier behind the building of a new 350 seat environmentally friendly arts space most likely to be built near Dalston Junction.
Multi-award winning Arcola Theatre have hired the architects behind the Beijing Olypmic Stadium to design a venue for new and traditional theatre and performance art events that is in no way harmful to the environment. The initiative is backed by Hackney Council who have offered three possible sites for the new venue, most likely to be built in Dalston, an area currently undergoing rapid redevelopment.
Ben Todd, the Arcola's executive director, explains the need to retain the same principles as the current theatre but provide a larger space for artists: “The driver for 350 seats is our desire to pay proper rates to artists for our main house productions, which is just not sustainable with the 150 seats we have at present. But we will continue to provide a platform for higher-risk, emerging artists in the other studios, with very much the same aesthetic as the existing Arcola.”
Global engineering firm Arup – the group of architects responsible for the Sydney Opera House – will now provide a green design, likely to be a test bed for new environmental initiatives in the arts.
Neill Woodger, of Arup's theatre consulting business, says the task was to conceive something that “exemplifies sustainability”: “This is the first public venue to use a sustainability framework to define the brief and conceptual design.”
Other attempts to make the arts more environmentally friendly include paperless events without flyers or programs and a move towards utilising digital technology to make information available.
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