Monday, 20 December 2021

Skelly & Couch projects steal the limelight at theatre and design honours

Theatre Royal Drury Lane - nominated in The Stage Awards 2022.

Skelly & Couch has completed environmental engineering work at two of the three venues nominated for the prestigious Theatre Building of the Year prize in The Stage Awards 2022.

The first nominee is the Grade II-listed Hall for Cornwall in Truro, which re-opened in October 2021 following a £26m upgrade led by Burrell Foley Fischer Architects, featuring increased capacity and an outstanding services strategy, resulting in lower energy consumption by the theatre.

The second venue to be nominated is the spectacular, Grade I-listed Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Haworth Tompkins) which underwent a £60m refurbishment restoring the public areas of the theatre to their former glory, reducing the number of seats in the auditorium from 2,200 to 2,000 for wider seats and extra legroom, while replacing all services in the existing Stage House and creating a new restaurant and offices, leading to a 40% improvement in the efficiency of the ventilation system.

Winners will be announced at The Stage Awards ceremony at Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 31 January 2022.

The double theatrical coup follows a Skelly & Couch hat trick in Dezeen magazine’s top 10 list of British Architecture projects of 2021.

Environmental engineering services at three of the top 10 UK projects were led by Skelly & Couch.

The projects are the multi-award-winning Cambridge Central Mosque (Marks Barfield Architects), known as the first ‘eco-mosque’ in Europe, and renowned for its excellent sustainability credentials; the David Brownlow Theatre at Horris Hill School, Newbury (Jonathan Tuckey Design), constructed using a cost-effective and time-reducing cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure, representing a saving of 40 tonnes of CO2 compared to traditional blockwork; and Design District London (HNNA & Knight Dragon), where Skelly & Couch has contributed robust environmental engineering solutions to all 16 buildings of the new and pioneering creative hub on the Greenwich Peninsula.