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Minghella Building Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading

Client:
University of Reading
Location:
Reading
Contact:
David Hunter 0117 974 3271 This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The Minghella Building for the Department of Film Theatre and Television is a new £8 million project to replace and enhance the current FT&T facilities at the University of Reading.

The building embodies the department's distinctive approach of using practical film and theatre as a cornerstone of non-vocational academic training.

The brief envisaged the building as a place of learning, production and display: primarily an educational facility, but also occasionally a public performance space.

It brings together a great number of highly specialised spaces on a tight site:

  • Two fully-equipped theatre spaces, licensed for public performance, and equipped with the latest sound, lighting and projection technology
  • An experimental studio for exploratory work including installations, new media presentations and multimedia performance
  • A state-of-the-art 70-person cinema with comfortable, raked seating, high definition digital projection and 7.1 surround sound; a multi-camera TV studio and mixing gallery
  • A post-production area including individual editing suites, training spaces and facilities for audio mixing

We conceived the building as a set of teaching spaces grouped around a vibrant central atrium. The emphasis is on encouragement of interaction and informal discourse, while maintaining critical acoustic separations. The building consists of three levels of occupied space, with staff space sitting above the principal volumes of the two larger theatres, the screening room and the TV studio. These spaces form the cornerstones of the massing. We have exceeded the brief's challenging acoustic performance criteria, and resolved complex air handling issues, partly through the creation of buffer zones such as workshops between performance spaces.

The design challenge for this type of project is to deal sensitively with great areas of 'dead' facade created by the 'black box' requirements of the principal spaces. There is little opportunity for fenestration, so we made the most of double-height slit windows to the control room stairs, and invested in double-length bricks, batched from two different colour sources, to give the facades interest and warmth.

Professor Lib Taylor, University of Reading said:

"I just wanted to write and thank (Stride Treglown) for all your hard work in designing this really lovely building. We are all absolutely thrilled with it and we couldn't have wished for a better space in which to work. It is very practical and appropriate for our work in so many of its excellent details, but it is also very beautiful and a lovely space to work in. The students couldn't take the smile off their faces when we first introduced it to them a couple of weeks ago. In fact, they have taken to it
like the proverbial ducks and are using the spaces (the breakout spaces in particular) just as we hoped. The staff are also enjoying all the spaces, especially the terrace – we had such lovely weather when we first moved in that we took full advantage of it.

I seem to spend enormous amounts of time showing people around and but I am told we are the envy of the University and many many people have commented on how lovely the building is. I know we will have trouble keeping it a secret and are expecting to be inundated with requests to use it!

...I wanted to write to you personally to thank you for all you have done and to let you know how delighted we are with the building. We really appreciated you listening so carefully to us and trying to work through what, at times, must have seemed like impossible demands."