PAC Brighton College →

─ Performance Art Centre

─ 3200m2

─ Completed 2024

─ In cooperation with Nicolas Hare Architects

─ Visuals by Forbes Massie Studio

─ Photography by Stijn Bollaert

In the last 10 years, Brighton College has enriched its 19th century campus with a series of new buildings, improving the facilities of this inner city Independent School. It has understood the strong power of architecture to improve learning environments.

The College asked for an integral educational building in which all performance arts would take place, with a theatre hall as heart of the building. The competition required a 3000 square meter building, including a 400 seat theatre hall, on a small site, in between the listed Gilbert Scott designed Main Building and the soon to be delivered Sports & Science building by OMA. 

In it response, krft positioned the theatre hall upwards, floating above a multi-oriented social space, that moves around the building, making connections to all outdoor spaces surrounding the site. This emphasizes the building as a pivot point of all movement around the outdoor campus space and avoids any possible 'backsides' of the building on campus.

The studio spaces, positioned in an underground level, use their double height to capture daylight and views from the ground floor and lift up the foyer space to the higher Home Ground level.

In its architecture, the building tries to bridge the monumental with the contemporary. The building rises up as a white chalk cliff from the green campus space. A facade, mixing contemporary brickwork with traditional flint bridges again the different characters of the surrounding campus.