Aviva Studios – Factory International, Manchester

2025 RIBA North West Award

Culture & entertainment
OMA for Manchester City Council
Contract value: £240m
GIA: 13,350m²
Cost per m²: £17,978

This new multipurpose arts venue on the edge of Manchester city centre, inserted into a complex site bounded by divergent functions and bisected by a road, is a major financial investment in the cultural life of England’s second city. OMA’s project stands as a new landmark with a distinctive and varied external form: part concrete warehouse, part office building and, most recognisably, part faceted-steel-clad theatre box.

Sandwiched between listed railway arches, the River Irwell, the Science and Industry Museum and a rash of new apartment blocks that form the regeneration of the former Granada TV Studios, this was not the most obvious of locations for a major arts building. The purpose was perhaps always more than the functions of the brief: to prime the regeneration of a backland area, to animate the inauspicious edges of the Irwell and to create a landmark visible from major train and road routes into the city.

The project achieves all these things. It is, however, about much more. The client curates ambitious and highly original arts events that required an unprecedented adaptability for technically conflicting functions. Making it possible to run a chamber orchestra in a space adjacent to a nightclub surrounded by residential towers, while ensuring total acoustic separation, demanded technical virtuosity. Jury members were particularly impressed by how the architects resolved these conflicting requirements, which were compounded by the fact that the separating wall is designed to be moved aside to link the principal volumes.

Other constraints included the road bisecting the site, incapable of being rerouted due to the presence of fibre-optic mains cables. This resulted in structural gymnastics to support the principal concert hall, expressed as the ‘steel pig’ – an affectionate term for the dramatic, muscular, storey-height red steel truss visible in the main foyer bar. This approach of letting the various materials crash into each other, whether the concrete of the performance warehouse or the corrugated metal cladding of the faceted theatre space, creates some unexpected contrasts.

The entrance lobby, foyer bar, nightclub, reading space, ticket office, social heart of the building – yes, that is all one space – is a counterintuitively low-ceilinged, and dark, yet welcoming introduction to the building. Avoiding the typical double-height light-filled atriums of arts venues, this approach creates a space which is simultaneously large yet intimate and is used throughout the day by people passing through, having coffee, going to events or just hanging out. It is the moody northern equivalent of the lobby of London’s Royal Festival Hall.

The great bonus of the lobby is its connectivity to routes between new external urban spaces, forming a link between the Science and Industry Museum, the commercial districts to the north and the newly opened River Irwell frontage. Manchester historically had a poor record on the treatment of its rivers, and this project starts the process of turning that around, metaphorically and literally.

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RIBA UK Awards 2025 sponsored by Autodesk, EH Smith, Equitone and VELUX