The full metal blanket cleverly deals with the triptych of accommodation beneath. The library is a two-storey volume, relating to the scale of Cathedral Street. The theatre, located deep into the widest part of the site, has a fly-tower for sets and flats, so the form of the roof scrambles over this, ensuring the bulk of the theatre itself remains clean and coherent when viewed in the round. Wedged between these two public amenities is a white, visual arts space, roof-lit via a triangular cut, and generously connected to the library and shared entrance hall.
There is one front door and one hall, encouraging an overlap of user and use, an ambition in projects which aim to use the hybrid nature of the combined programmes to generate conversation and interest amongst diverse and often distinct communities. So in the library, as a teenage girl logs on to use the virtual 'yourspace', she can't avoid seeing the art collection in the physical 'art-space'.
Oddly, the theatre feels somewhat disconnected from the library and gallery, and is uniquely closed to the entrance hall, possibly in response to fire regulations. A black box, it seems to retreat into its blue-grey shell, a space where client-led programmatic demands inevitably determine too much of the architecture and make this room feel aloof in an otherwise gregarious complex.
The route into the theatre also seems a little domestic in scale and underplayed, given the massive impact the theatre has on the physical form of the project. The foyer and its bar, though, are excitingly sliced and layered, colourful and glamorous, overlooking the plinth and town. Its well judged and designed to always feel full, even when empty, a critical trick in regional theatres.
The library itself is the most successful room and is busy and full of noise and life. It feels like an information market, with a great shop window on the street corner. It says much of the architects' knowledge of libraries that they have managed to make a space which feels open for business, yet organized and controlled. This is achieved through the obvious attention given to lighting (cast in walls, columns, or ceilings, integrated into book stacks), furniture layout and design, and through a considered use of natural or applied colour. As much of the library is board-marked concrete, its grey colour sets the tone for the atmosphere of the place.
This tone hums quietly, interrupted only by the fall of warm natural or artificial light on the walls or floors, or the stark and enjoyably startling use of citric-orange gloss paint on the metal stairs. There is a beautiful, painterly sense to the composition, and the eye starts to make formal connections between elements of the same orange-red colour against the grey background – the stairs, the Eames bucket chairs, a boy with a red hooded top. There's a red-lettered spine of a book, an orange bottle on a table, the red information desk – some elements are fixed, some are transient, all objects made equal in value, part of a family, united in colour.
The room is in fact like a built version of an heroic 1960s drawing by English architect Gordon Cullen, where elements were colour-linked in red to indicate the power of composition and relationship between elements in our visual environment. This led to the somewhat unrealistic notion that the entire built environment could be controlled and composed to the point where it could be considered a 'work of art' and where its resultant beauty would make for a more coherent society. Here, though, as so many of the elements are a result of human occupation or accident and not necessarily of architectural design, the confident use of colour enables a scenario where, somehow, in the abstract, people can belong to the library building and beyond to the gallery and theatre foyer, and in reality, connect one to another. This gives even more weight to the sense of optimism already generated by the building on the site – the reader and artist and building and town, slowly, colourfully connecting.
