A series of new cultural and performance venues are now adaptive, able to be reconfigured for different use cases. Launching 18 October, Aviva Studios is a brand-new cultural landmark in Manchester “built with flexibility in mind” and will become the permanent home for the arts organisation Factory International, creators of the Manchester International Festival.

Designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the building was conceived to offer an ultra-flexible space that can be adapted to suit different events or performances. The building’s main event space, the Warehouse features a 21-meter-high movable acoustic wall which allows the space to be divided to suit any experience, from major exhibitions to more intimate performances.

Scenes from the opening performance of Free Your Mind at Aviva Studios sees dancers on a long wide stage and above them a long screen showing a closeup of a mans eyes
At Aviva Studios a workman in hi vis moves a giant acoustic wall across a vast open warehouse space
At Aviva Studios a group dance performance on stage is watched by the audience
  1. Free Your Mind, the official opening production for Aviva Studios, the home of Factory International © Daniel Devlin, October 2023
  2. & 3. Aviva Studios. Photo by Marco Cappelletti, courtesy of OMA and Factory International

Lead architect Ellen van Loon has said the venue is “a space that can create multiple opportunities and endless configurations and environments. It will be a new type of performance space, a unique crossover between a fixed theatre and flexible warehouse.”

To celebrate the opening, Aviva Studios is hosting Free Your Mind, a live immersive dance show based on The Matrix and directed by Danny Boyle, which will play out across the entirety of the building’s flexible spaces.

More arts venues are now investing in flexibility, to enable their spaces to morph and flex as needed. The Perelman Center for the Performing Arts designed by REX Architects opened September 2023. Located next to the memorial for the World Trade Center in New York, the cube-shaped building is planned around three venues which can be used independently or combined into ten different possible arrangements. These can then be further tailored to performance needs via movable floors, balconies and seating, resulting in more than 60 possible configurations in total (see video clip below of the theater's mechanics).

B Roll Theater Mechanics Transformation

Theater mechanics at the Perelman Center for Performing Arts designed by REX.

In late 2022, the design and innovation studio CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati and architect Italo Rota collaborated to transform a former hospital into one of Italy’s leading cultural hubs: AGO Modena. The design features a lightweight, kinetic roof which can fold and move to create different spatial configurations. At the launch, Carlo Ratti, founding partner of CRA and director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT commented, “Cultural spaces should be thought of as dynamic, capable of incorporating change over time. AGO’s architecture sets up flexible, reconfigurable spaces where past and future complement each other.”

The Perelman Arts Center in New York A nightime view shows the huge marble facade lit up
A view of AGO Modena shows the buildings white origami like roof in the process of opening above a red stone courtyard in sunshine
  1. Perelman Performing Arts Center designed by REX. Image Iwan Baan
  2. AGO Modena (Credits CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati)

The concept of flexible architecture is not entirely novel. The Shed at Hudson Yards in New York which opened in 2019 features a moveable roof which can be rolled on wheels to double the size of the performance space for example. But in an unpredictable era and one in which investments need to work harder than ever, flexibility is an asset for buildings of any kind, helping to futureproof them for the evolving ways we collectively occupy space. In the future, these multifunctional, multi-purpose spaces are likely to become the norm not the exception.

Main image: Aviva Studios. Photo by Marco Cappelletti, courtesy of OMA and Factory International

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