The new St Ann's Warehouse is a 25,000sq.ft site housing two flexible performance spaces. Firstly, a 10,000sq.ft versatile theatre space, with capacity for 300-800 people, to accommodate St. Ann's core theatre and music programming, large-scale festivals, and special community milestone events. Secondly, a 1000sq.ft multi-use studio, dedicated to local artists and community groups, to especially suit intimate, smaller scale programmes and events.
Constructed within the historic 1860 Tobacco Warehouse in the hip neighbourhood of DUMBO, it is hoped that the project will make Brooklyn Bridge Park a home for culture for future generations. In addition to theatre consultancy, Charcoalblue provided architectural lighting design and acoustic services to the project.
"In 2012, the Tobacco Warehouse was a ruin - converting it into a theatre has been a complete joy, and a particularly tricky thing to do!" says Charcoalblue's Managing Partner, Andy Hayles. "When there is so little of the original building left - really just a 20' high perimeter wall - every column, beam and wall has to be perfectly placed and carefully considered not only for its immediate impact, but also for its impact if the next production turns the auditorium through 90 degrees!"
The design celebrates contradiction, with discrete yet unexpected materials of glass bricks, black steel and plywood. The new theatre is inserted snugly into the walls on three sides, allowing the historic arched doors and windows to remain untouched. The fourth side is occupied by support spaces and community amenities. A broad circulation hall defines the theatre and community spaces, and offers flexibility either to host events or to expand.
St. Ann's Warehouse (SAW) fills a vital niche in New York City's cultural landscape as an artistic home and destination for the American avant-garde, international companies of distinction, and talented, emerging artists ready to work on a grand scale.
"It is a new building which past audiences will recognise. The lines between public areas, backstage and auditorium are purposefully and sensitively blurred - in fact almost non-existent in places - offering the SAW team infinite opportunities to challenge the environment and continue to surprise audiences," says Charcoalblue's John Owens, who runs the company's NYC studio.
Charcoalblue's acoustician Byron Harrison comments: "We are proud to have also provided our in-house, integrated acoustic design service for the project. SAW has made its home in a neighbourhood between two of the noisiest transport thoroughfares in the City - the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges - which presented a challenge. While the existing walls are very thick masonry they don't provide the acoustic separation that typical contemporary cavity wall constructions provide. Therefore, new specialty acoustic windows and doors have been fitted into the existing openings, but largely without the vestibules we'd normally expect into a theatre and certainly between a performance space and the exterior.
"A much-considered design decision was putting concrete on the roof of the performance area. A minimally thick concrete slab was included to combat the helicopters on the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge traffic noise, which is almost overhead. We also installed a distributed ventilation system with cooling. Contending with continuous background noise due to air movement is not something SAW has encountered before. While low noise levels are needed for dramatic p
