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WE STARTED ON SITE BEFORE ALL THE DRAWINGS WERE COMPLETE
- Emma McLaren. Photography by Heini Schneebeli
Sutherland Lyall speaks to Emma McLaren of van Heyningen and Howard Architects about developing a new conference centre for a site on a showground in Suffolk.
The 100ha Suffolk show grounds at Ipswich are packed with cars and marquees and cattle and sheep pens. But only for two days a year. The rest of the time it is just a big green space which looks a bit like a racecourse between seasons. The owner, Suffolk Agricultural Association, occupies one of the few permanent buildings, the Trinity Rooms, a shed-like structure with what looks like a 1930s suburban villa stretched across on the front. Apart from the annual show, the association is quite an active institution among local schools, colleges and the farming community. Conscious of the underused site's potential, it decided to start thinking about its year-round use. What the association decided it needed was a new IT-equipped conference centre. It carried out a masterplanning study which identified the best site as being adjacent to the Trinity Rooms which, like it, would face north to the access road, with a 24m-wide garden between the two.
Following a 2003 pitch against several other practices, van Heyningen and Howard, which had designed the nearby Sutton Hoo visitor centre, was selected as architect and started work with a team of consultants with which it had worked a lot before.
Project architect Emma McLaren says: 'Initially the building was going to be one big hall. But the client gradually developed the idea of flexible spaces.'A consequence of that was the need to be able to control noise between whatever spaces were set up at any one time, and Arup Acoustics was drafted in to advise. Unexpectedly, noise leakage from the building became an issue for local people on this open site: even though the nearest house was Ikm away, planning permission was conditional on the building's skin being acoustically opaque. This, McLaren says, 'had consequences on the services. Our desire was to have a naturally ventilated building, so redesigning it so it could be totally sealed increased the budget. It can still be ventilated naturally'.
The new building is a big 26...