Hugh Cochlin is in his office on the west coast of Canada, listening to a complex tale about a Dublin arts centre that has vanished. At the end he leans in with a knowing expression. “The story you just described is basically Vancouver 20 years ago,” he says.
His city’s skyline, with its high-rise condominium and office towers, may be dramatically different from Dublin’s, but both places encountered similar issues with the availability of cultural venues and workspace. As construction in each boomed, local government began to require new mixed-use developments to include cultural space in their designs.
In Dublin, an early project of the kind was to be a performance and arts centre as part of the redevelopment of the Tivoli Theatre, on Francis Street in the Liberties, which was demolished in 2019 to make way for what is now an aparthotel. The original planning application had envisaged using that section of the new building for a gym; the proposal changed after Dublin City Council expressed concern about “the loss of the Tivoli Theatre without the provision of a replacement or alternative cultural facility”.
The council approved the new plan, which allowed “for the Tivoli to be reborn on this site as a flexible performance and arts space for use by the wider arts and performance community”. Anthony Byrne, the theatre’s owner, told the planning department in April 2017: “We confirm that we undertake to continue to provide a cultural facility as described in the drawings and documentation submitted.” (He also proposed that the development’s courtyard host performances and film screenings.)
The proposed centre appears to be ambitiously adaptable. Architectural drawings show it as capable of transforming from a 160-seat auditorium to a white-cube visual arts gallery. It was built to shell-and-core stage, a common construction practice that essentially means providing an empty space with bare breeze-block walls; features such as ceilings, partition walls, lighting and furnishing are decided on and paid for later, by the landlord or tenant.
When the time came to hand over the Francis Street space for this fit-out stage, Byrne seemed no longer to be involved in the project.
That put an onus on Staycity, owner of the aparthotel on the redeveloped Tivoli site, to come up with a new plan for the arts centre. In October 2020 a company connected to Staycity, named Cantarini, outlined a proposal involving the Winding Stair hospitality group. According to reporting by Michael Lanigan in the Dublin Inquirer, Winding Stair (the owner of which, Brian Montague, is a former chairman of the Complex arts centre) would manage the hosting of exhibitions, performances, installations and indoor and outdoor concerts. But by mid-2023 the hospitality group was no longer involved in the project, according to Staycity.
What happened to Byrne’s plan to operate a space where the Tivoli would be reborn as a cultural venue? SCA Planning, which acted as his agent in his planning application, has not responded to several queries about the project.
Cochlin is principal of Proscenium Architecture + Interiors, a well-regarded Canadian firm founded 29 years ago by theatre-loving architects who split off from a larger firm that, he says, was less interested in cultural projects. In Vancouver, Cochlin explains, local and national government jointly developed a planning policy that would match the developer of a big construction scheme with a cultural organisation. “The department will say, ‘Okay, this arts group is going to be part of this project too. We’ll give you a bonus density,’” he says, referring to the fact that developers are allowed to fit more into their schemes in return for providing cultural space.
Cochlin is currently working on a new theatre as the podium – which is to say an adjoining lower-level element – of an apartment tower. Vancouver’s French-culture organisation La Maison de la Francophonie needs a home, so the city council mandated the developer of the new complex to build a theatre and offices for it to shell-and-core stage. La Maison de la Francophonie will then pay for the fit-out. As the organisation’s representative, Proscenium liaises with the apartment block’s architect.
Cochlin’s firm also designed the BMO Theatre Centre, which houses two Vancouver stage companies, the Arts Club and Bard on the Beach. That project involved turning a shell space into a 250-seat theatre, rehearsal rooms, costume workshops and offices for the two organisations.
He says commercial and residential architects are often surprised by some of the requirements for cultural space. A theatre needs to be acoustically isolated, for example. “They say, ‘What do you mean it has to have full-block walls, and there has to be an air space, and a stud wall has to have drywall each side of it?’ They thought they could just build a standard wall,” Cochlin says.
“The big one is height in the room. You have to calculate your sightlines to the playing surface from the riser system [of banked seating]. You have to calculate the height of the hang from the lighting grid. You have to have the space and the acoustic isolation, with a slab up above that pushes the height of the room up. Normally, we want to get 25-27ft” – about 7.5-8m, or roughly twice the normal ceiling height – “depending on the size of the theatre. And, of course, it has to be structure-free.”
In Dublin, there is already some scepticism about how successful the city council’s planning guidelines, which require 5 per cent of a big development to be earmarked for cultural use, will be. Not far from Francis Street, at Newmarket, once home to much-loved Sunday markets, the owners of a new office building whose planning permission required it to provide an indoor market have applied for change of use, arguing that the finished construction is unviable for this.
Last year the visual artist Eve Woods held an exhibition in the empty Tivoli space. “There’s pillars down the centre, which in their plan is where the stage and tiered seating is supposed to be,” she says. (“If someone’s putting columns on the stage, they’ve made a mistake,” Cochlin says.) Dublin City Council inspected the arts-centre space after complaints about the site, but it says that “the positioning of columns and ceiling height did not form part of the planning enforcement officer’s investigation, as such a complaint was not brought to our attention at the time of investigation”.
It may be difficult to imagine the compact new space hosting the big club nights, wrestling events and pantomimes associated with the old Tivoli Theatre, but small venues have always played a role in our cultural life. Four years ago the owners of the Bestseller cafe, on Dawson Street in Dublin, heard that Rex Ryan was looking for a home for his Glass Mask theatre company. So they agreed that he could create a 60-seat theatre configuration there, erecting and then dismantling a set each night, and delivering programmes that subvert assumptions about dinner theatre. (Last month you could catch the tense relationship drama Men’s Business; this month Glass Mask is staging the adopted-siblings psychological thriller Little One.) “It was all hustling,” Ryan says, pointing to a recently built stage and lighting rig that he raised funds for.
David Doyle is the Irish executive producer of Jermyn Street Theatre, a 70-seat studio venue in the West End of London that used to be restaurant changingrooms. “Improbability charges theatre as a whole, but I think it’s particularly evident in small spaces. There’s an improbability that they exist, and because of that people are really attracted to them,” he says.
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Jermyn Street Theatre’s programming savvily alternates between unexpected spins on familiar material (a three-handed Pride and Prejudice), unfamiliar offerings (the Windrush epic The Lonely Londoners) and chances to rediscover neglected plays (an upcoming revival of Micheál Mac Liammóir’s The Importance of Being Oscar). The theatre has no government subsidy, leaving Doyle to sell as many tickets as he can, find alternative funding and, if possible, secure transfers to larger London houses.
“We as an artistic community need to be vocal in understanding how planning is happening in Dublin and then get ourselves involved in it,” Doyle says. “I wouldn’t expect an architect designing a hotel to understand the needs of ceiling height or soundproofing. We can’t let others do the translating of our [requirements] to other people.”
When asked about the future of the Tivoli performance and arts centre, a Staycity spokesperson says: “Planning and consultation with key stakeholders, including Business to Arts, is under way to see it activated and optimised as soon as possible. Layout and fit-out plans will be finalised in line with current discussions, based on the original usage granted.”
After decades of cultural entrepreneurs repurposing old buildings, Dublin City Council has granted permission to several developments that incorporate artist workplaces – the Newmarket office building; the “innovation hub” on the former Irish Glass Bottle site; another Staycity aparthotel, on Little Mary Street; a hotel development on New Row South; Irish Life Assurance’s offices on Albert Terrace; a residential development at Phibsborough’s Old Bakery site – but none of these council decisions identifies an end user of those workspaces. If an artist or cultural organisation isn’t at the table, they can’t voice what the design of those spaces needs.
