• 16 years ago
Hall One, the main concert hall, is a breathtaking new concert venue for London; intimate, perfectly proportioned, beautifully finished. When lit, it is, as Peter Millican, Director of Parabola Land describes it, a ‘jewel box’. It is acoustically engineered to the very highest standard. In terms of its construction, it is a building within a building – a box that sits on rubber springs to give it complete acoustic separation from the rest of the building and the outside world. The hall is three storeys tall and is accessed from the concert foyer. It is built to the regular shoebox geometry – a double cube – that is considered most successful for small concert halls. Structural columns around the hall are set away from the walls to allow curtains to be drawn between the columns and the wall to modify the acoustic for speech or amplified music. This relatively complex design detail allows this adaptation to happen without changing the architectural appearance of the hall. The hall seats 420 people. There are 300 seats in the gently raked stalls and around the auditorium, in an upper gallery, there are a further 120 seats. It accommodates up to 30 musicians on the stage. The hall is uplit behind the columns where white, red and blue tubes can be dimmed and mixed to produce a range of effects. Hall One is fully equipped for recording. A large screen can be raised from the back of the stage for films, conferences and presentations and a technical attic allows moving theatre lights to be adjusted.