Kings Place
Encyclopedia
Kings Place is a building in London
’s Kings Cross
area, providing music
and visual arts
venues combined with seven floors of office space, a home for The Guardian
newspaper since December 2008 and the headquarters of Network Rail
. Kings Place is also the London base office of Logica, the global IT and management consultancy company.
Secondly, as a grade A commercial development providing 26,000 sq m of office space, Kings Place has achieved the adaptability to attract, among others, The Guardian
and The Observer
newspapers, Logica and Network Rail
.
Kings Place houses the first new public concert hall to be built in central London since the completion of the Barbican Concert hall
over 25 years ago in 1982 (Cadogan Hall
and LSO St Luke's were adapted from old buildings in that period).
, just 150 metres from King’s Cross
/St Pancras
train stations. King’s Cross is now the biggest transport hub in Europe
. On its eastern side the building overlooks Battlebridge Basin on the Regent's Canal
which is also home to many residential boats and the London Canal Museum
on the opposite side of the water.
In late 2008 the building became the home for The Guardian and The Observer newspapers. Two orchestras; the London Sinfonietta
and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
also reside within Kings Place and regularly perform there. Central St Martins
, one of the art colleges within the University of the Arts London
, will bring a major visual arts community into the area from mid-2011, when it moves into Argent’s 67 acres (271,139.6 m²) King’s Cross central development.
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 walls to modify the acoustic for speech or amplified music.
, the Wigmore
and several other halls. In this way it was possible to optimise the design for Hall One before construction began.
Thanks to a series of linking bridges, however, each of the upper floors is experienced by the office user as a very large contiguous plate.
For the office users no stair case was provided for general use so the only way to access above ground floors is via the lifts. This makes for inconvenience when the lifts breakdown and reduces the green impact of the building. The two common staircases have been designed so as only to be available in case of fire.
and Camden
. Kings Place outreach program works in three areas: Education, Community Engagement and Participation and Family. Music and arts organisations resident and performing at Kings Place offer educational classes, workshops, opportunities for participation in performances as well as family events. Past events and projects have included family drumming workshops and professional development sessions with the London Sinfonietta and their visiting musicians from the Ugandan Dance Academy and a visual arts project with local schools and the Visual Learning Foundation using the construction of the building as inspiration.
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
’s Kings Cross
Kings Cross, London
King's Cross is an area of London partly in the London Borough of Camden and partly in the London Borough of Islington. It is an inner-city district located 2.5 miles north of Charing Cross. The area formerly had a reputation for being a red light district and run-down. However, rapid regeneration...
area, providing music
Music venue
A music venue is any location used for a concert or musical performance. Music venues range in size and location, from an outdoor bandshell or bandstand or a concert hall to an indoor sports stadium. Typically, different types of venues host different genres of music...
and visual arts
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
venues combined with seven floors of office space, a home for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper since December 2008 and the headquarters of Network Rail
Network Rail
Network Rail is the government-created owner and operator of most of the rail infrastructure in Great Britain .; it is not responsible for railway infrastructure in Northern Ireland...
. Kings Place is also the London base office of Logica, the global IT and management consultancy company.
Overview
Kings Place is first and foremost a music and visual arts venue, with a range of facilities ideal for performance, exhibition and education. The music, arts and restaurant areas are arranged around public spaces which form a central hub to the building. The arts facilities include free access to a range of art galleries.Secondly, as a grade A commercial development providing 26,000 sq m of office space, Kings Place has achieved the adaptability to attract, among others, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
and The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
newspapers, Logica and Network Rail
Network Rail
Network Rail is the government-created owner and operator of most of the rail infrastructure in Great Britain .; it is not responsible for railway infrastructure in Northern Ireland...
.
Kings Place houses the first new public concert hall to be built in central London since the completion of the Barbican Concert hall
Barbican Centre
The Barbican Centre is the largest performing arts centre in Europe. Located in the City of London, England, the Centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings and art exhibitions. It also houses a library, three restaurants, and a conservatory...
over 25 years ago in 1982 (Cadogan Hall
Cadogan Hall
Cadogan Hall is a 900-seat capacity concert hall on Sloane Terrace in Chelsea / Belgravia in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, United Kingdom...
and LSO St Luke's were adapted from old buildings in that period).
Origins
According to its Director, Peter Milican, the concept of Kings Place was "to create an architecturally inspiring mixed-use development which, without recourse to public capital funding, would deliver a major new arts centre next to King’s Cross/ St Pancras and offer something to the local community". Construction on the site began in 2005 and was completed in summer 2008; the opening festival started on the 1st October 2008.Location
Kings place sits on the east side of York WayYork Way
York Way is a major road in the London Borough of Islington, running north for one mile from the junction of Pentonville Road and Euston Road, adjacent to King's Cross railway station towards Kentish Town and Holloway. At its northern end the road becomes Brecknock Road...
, just 150 metres from King’s Cross
King's Cross railway station
King's Cross railway station, also known as London King's Cross, is a central London railway terminus opened in 1852. The station is on the northern edge of central London, at the junction of the A501 Euston Road and York Way, in the Kings Cross district and within the London Borough of Camden on...
/St Pancras
St Pancras railway station
St Pancras railway station, also known as London St Pancras and since 2007 as St Pancras International, is a central London railway terminus celebrated for its Victorian architecture. The Grade I listed building stands on Euston Road in St Pancras, London Borough of Camden, between the...
train stations. King’s Cross is now the biggest transport hub in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. On its eastern side the building overlooks Battlebridge Basin on the Regent's Canal
Regent's Canal
Regent's Canal is a canal across an area just north of central London, England. It provides a link from the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal, just north-west of Paddington Basin in the west, to the Limehouse Basin and the River Thames in east London....
which is also home to many residential boats and the London Canal Museum
London Canal Museum
London Canal Museum in the King's Cross area of London, England, is a regional museum that displays information about the history of London's canals.- History :...
on the opposite side of the water.
In late 2008 the building became the home for The Guardian and The Observer newspapers. Two orchestras; the London Sinfonietta
London Sinfonietta
The London Sinfonietta is an English chamber orchestra founded in 1968 and based in London. The ensemble specialises in contemporary music and works across a wide range of genres, performing modern classics alongside world premieres, and includes music by electronica artists as well as folk and...
and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is a British period instrument orchestra. The OAE is a resident orchestra of the Southbank Centre, London, associate orchestra at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and has its headquarters at Kings Place...
also reside within Kings Place and regularly perform there. Central St Martins
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London. The school has an outstanding international reputation, and is considered one of the world's leading art and design institutions...
, one of the art colleges within the University of the Arts London
University of the Arts London
The University of the Arts London, formerly known as the London Institute, is a collegiate university comprising six internationally recognised art, design, fashion and media colleges in London, England...
, will bring a major visual arts community into the area from mid-2011, when it moves into Argent’s 67 acres (271,139.6 m²) King’s Cross central development.
Architectural philosophy
Following a limited architectural competition, Dixon Jones was appointed as the architect for Kings Place. The brief was complex and subtle: it was to be a large building of far higher quality than the normal spec office development. The building had to be durable, not only in terms of quality of the build materials, but in its design. It had to be spatially generous and environmentally impeccable. Most importantly, it had to fit into a local urban architecture which is not uniform in scale.Hall One
Hall One, the main concert hall 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.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 walls to modify the acoustic for speech or amplified music.
Acoustics
The architecture of Hall one emerged from a collaboration between Dixon Jones and Arup’s acousticians. As part of the research that preceded the design, the developer, the architects, the engineers and the project manager visited Japan to look in detail at a dozen concert halls. The aim was to differentiate very precisely between a variety of modern concert halls and to examine what solution would best meet the requirements of Kings Place. Next a computer model of the proposed Kings Place auditorium was made. This was tested against computer models of the ConcertgebouwConcertgebouw
The Concertgebouw is a concert hall in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Dutch term "concertgebouw" literally translates into English as "concert building"...
, the Wigmore
Wigmore Hall
Wigmore Hall is a leading international recital venue that specialises in hosting performances of chamber music and is best known for classical recitals of piano, song and instrumental music. It is located at 36 Wigmore Street, London, UK and was built to provide London with a venue that was both...
and several other halls. In this way it was possible to optimise the design for Hall One before construction began.
Oak veneer
The oak veneer inside hall One has come from the same 500-year old German oak tree. After felling the wood was cut into 5-metre lengths and boiled at 80 °C for one week, then sliced. The tree has produced an acre of superb veneer. It has been used in Hall one to cover the panels, columns, roof coffers, the back of seats, the doors, and the desks.Features
The wavy glass runs along the west-facing York Way frontage; the three-layered glass façade is a free-standing transparent surface made up of hundreds of very slightly curved sheets of glass. As well as reducing heat gain from the afternoon sun, the glass wall provides Kings Place with a distinctive public face.Facilities
- Hall 1 – 420-seat concert hall with fixed seating
- Hall 2 – flexible performance and rehearsal space (seats audience of 220 or 330 standing)
- St Pancras Room – auditorium for speech, seating 100
- Three rehearsal break-out spaces:
- Limehouse Room
- Wenlock Room
- Horsfall Room
- Recording and broadcasting facilities
- Two general dressing rooms
- Teaching room
- Office space and headquarters for London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
- The Music base – shared office space with desks for small music organisations
- Pangolin London:
- Sculpture gallery
Food and drink
The Rotunda Restaurant spans the area of the building facing Regent’s Canal and Battlebridge Basin. The Rotunda Bar features a curved bar that mirrors the shape of the building. The Green & Fortune Café is housed in the central atrium of the building on the ground floor level.Offices
All seven levels above ground at Kings Place are commercial office space. From some angles Kings Place can be seen as four joined but separate structures. This breaking down of the mass of the building was critical to the planners and has allowed light and a sense of openness to penetrate to basement level.Thanks to a series of linking bridges, however, each of the upper floors is experienced by the office user as a very large contiguous plate.
For the office users no stair case was provided for general use so the only way to access above ground floors is via the lifts. This makes for inconvenience when the lifts breakdown and reduces the green impact of the building. The two common staircases have been designed so as only to be available in case of fire.
Outreach programme
Kings Place is committed to promoting discovery of the arts in its surrounding boroughs of IslingtonLondon Borough of Islington
The London Borough of Islington is a London borough in Inner London. It was formed in 1965 by merging the former metropolitan boroughs of Islington and Finsbury. The borough contains two Westminster parliamentary constituencies, Islington North and Islington South & Finsbury...
and Camden
London Borough of Camden
In 1801, the civil parishes that form the modern borough were already developed and had a total population of 96,795. This continued to rise swiftly throughout the 19th century, as the district became built up; reaching 270,197 in the middle of the century...
. Kings Place outreach program works in three areas: Education, Community Engagement and Participation and Family. Music and arts organisations resident and performing at Kings Place offer educational classes, workshops, opportunities for participation in performances as well as family events. Past events and projects have included family drumming workshops and professional development sessions with the London Sinfonietta and their visiting musicians from the Ugandan Dance Academy and a visual arts project with local schools and the Visual Learning Foundation using the construction of the building as inspiration.