Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester Metropolitan University has built a brand-new facility dedicated to the arts and humanities as part of a large capital development program.

The project brought together many of the University’s arts programs, including drama, TV, film, and languages, distributed over seven floors of study space. The new building is home to a 180-seat theatre, a 92-seat lecture theatre, two movement studios, eight acting studios, two TV studios and three radio studios.

We provided space planning and technical system design for the drama spaces and acoustic design for the entire building. The fully accessible main theatre and lecture theatre benefit from a full stage lighting and audiovisual specification and network capability as well as retractable seating for flexibility of format. The main theatre also features adaptable lighting and stage engineering with rolling beams overhead for rigging. One of the movement studios also includes a full lighting and sound infrastructure enabling the University to present small scale productions. The compact building layout required the integration of highly effective acoustic solutions to allow neighbouring spaces to be able to operate simultaneously while at the same time avoiding any mutual interference due to noise transmission.