Carriage Works

Tonkin Zulaikha Greer's rebirthing of the Carriage Works as a performing arts centre was a long time coming. The dilapidated Works had been an informal arts space since the nineties, when Belvoir Street Theatre rented it for a song, and Olympic opening ceremony rehearsals were held there in moderate secrecy. But while the Olympics demonstrated its capacity to hold big, non-conventional, electrified, acrobatic theatre, Carriage Works clearly needed a fix-up. One of Belvoir Street's performances had to be closed early, for instance, because the seating collapsed.

TZG's design left the original fabric and the graffitied, smoked patina of the interior intact. The cast-iron columns and steel trusses, and the overhead gantries, gabled bays, and timber doors were also kept. TZG's insertions were quite deliberate, using the materials typical to our period - reinforced concrete, hot rolled steel and aluminium. They organise the space into large, flexible sections: three theatres, rehearsal and workshop spaces, and administration offices, with the foyers and public areas occupying the voids in-between. These areas offer both a sense of the magisterial scale of the building, and a more intimate perspective of its rough details.

Guarding one side of the foyer are a stack of concrete boxes, eroded and excavated to give a sense of being incomplete. They evoke the great timber hulks, at various stages of construction, slowly moving through the Carriage Works. Not having the budget to refine them, as intended, with a patterned finish, TZG designed the boxes to be light in colour to catch the passing sweep of shadows generated by the skylights. The boxes are freestanding and acoustically isolated, and house a variety of functions, including office space.

Within two skins of concrete located three metres apart, Carriage Works' principal theatre is a controlled space, acoustically designed by Arup Acoustics. Technicians and patrons use the separation as a circulation zone. The whole structure floats on neoprene pads to remove all ground vibration generated by the main trunk railway line thirty metres to the south.

The principal theatre will accommodate "Performance Space", an experimental theatre company formerly of Cleveland Street, as well as physical theatre companies Stalker and Legs on the Wall. To make room, a portion of the iron and steel roof was removed, with a new wave-form roof of fibreglass poking through. An abstracted version of the monitor shapes of the existing roof gables, the lifted roof lets light deep into the plan and aids in passive ventilation through a stack effect. As the only major alteration to the building's fabric, the new roof structure was subject to the greatest scrutiny by approval committees, with the architects strongly arguing for its necessity in shaping a viable space within the old.

Not that the old is forgotten. The old roof trusses have been reused as a gateway structure at the entrance to the complex, standing on their ends and reaching eighteen metres into the air. They mark out a new ground-level entry plaza for Carriage Works, which was built one level below the street without strong connections to its urban environment. TZG's design makes the connections for the first time, opening this monumental-and until now, largely unknown-building to the general public. +

PREVIOUS Freestanding concrete boxes, like ghostly locomotives, mark one side of the Carriage Works' foyer. The major contemporary intervention in TZG's revamp, they provide flexible, acoustically-isolated working rooms as well as controlling perceptions of space within the monumental structure. 1 Off-form concrete contrasts with the smoky patina of the original walls and floors. 2 Atop the new stacked concrete boxes. 3 Foyer. The drama of the existing Carriage Workshops interiors is generated both by scale and the repetition of ten bays, each ninety metres long and eighteen wide. 4 To accomodate professional and emerging contemporary performance artists, the project includes three large flexible theatres, together with rehearsal and workshop spaces. IMAGES by Michael Nicholson.