Temporary Performance Space for the Sydney Festival 2012 / Iain Blampied + Oliver Hessian

By: Lidija Grozdanic | July - 19 - 2011

The aim of the project is to develop a theater / performance / stage project for the Sydney Festival 2012, a one-month festival with hundreds of events occurring in the city. The project was designed along a number of briefs and locations that varied in program, size, character, and location.
Iain Blampied and Oliver Hessian approached the project brief with the understanding that ideally this venue should be an expressive piece of architecture that attracts visitors in its own right while also leaving the inhabiting director as much freedom for creativity and as little distraction as possible. The approach taken involves the investigation of architecture as a temporal, dynamic system, a performative envelope and a machine that mirrors a multiplicity of worlds.
The transition is intended to link into the wider journey, slowly remove the audience from their setting in order to raise expectations and prepare them for the next performance. The elevations would be integrated with the internal movement of the audience and looked into ways in which the variables might be manipulated in response to this movement-the variables possibly being: radius, length and density.  There are two layers of the skin which explore the use of color, creating a dynamic effect when moving passed the elevation as one layer’s density read against the other, and as the transparency shifts with the perspective.
The elevations are split into panels with each panel having its own assembly information in order for the cylinders to be cut to the correct lengths and fixed together in the warehouse before being shipped to site. The average weight of a single 4x3m panel is estimated at 450kg. The entire cladding structure is made up of 140 panels making a total weight estimate of 70 tons.