St Bede’s Performing Arts Centre

This project departs from the standard model of a music/drama facility in its focus on educating students through their total involvement in the creation of productions, from ideas to presentation. In response to this, the focus of this design is as much on the ancillary facilities as it is on the main auditorium where performances are received by parents, teachers and fellow students.

The brief was to create a versatile indoor/outdoor space that would provide for everything from the most intimate of individual music lessons to tutorials, ensemble work, recording, multimedia activities and large scale school productions. The resulting building provides sound insulated practice rooms, computer laboratories and an auditorium, all connected by wiring and technical patch panels to enable communication between the various performance spaces. Communication is further enhanced by the careful placement of windows to enable clear sight lines from space to space.