DRAMATIC REGENERATION.

Packing a lively drama school complete with three theatres, public amenities and numerous teaching rooms onto a very tight site in central London was no easy task. To have done it with generosity and grace is quite remarkable.

RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, is one of the most exclusive schools in the world. Thousands apply every year, but only just over 30 get in. Many of the most well-known British actors went there, and a remarkably thorough training they got: they were taught not only to proclaim from the boards, but to spit and storm, dance and sing, fight with swords and fists -- and even act as ushers in the auditoria. As well as offering courses in acting, RADA teaches scenography, stage management, and specialist technical matters and has a total student body of some 700, full and part time.

Remarkably, all these and the 50 staff who run the place were until recently crowded together in a tall narrow building, only 15m wide that ran from Gower Street through to Malet Street in Bloomsbury. The Malet Street theatre block was built in 1921 to a design by Geoffrey Norman, and the Gower Street building in 1927, when the original Georgian texture of the area was being torn apart by the colossal expansion of London University. After being partly destroyed by enemy action during the Second World War, the theatre was rebuilt in 1954, when rehearsal rooms, classrooms and workshops were added. The new Vanbrugh Theatre (named after Irene Vanbrugh, the distinguished actress, not John Vanbrugh the architect) was much larger and contrasted with the intimate George Bernard Shaw (GBS) Theatre in the basement of Gower Street. The Vanbrugh proved too big, and the whole place was acoustically transparent, causing everyone to creep about when the theatres were in use. There was no proper connection between the Gower and Malet Street sides because the Vanbrugh (entered from Malet Street) filled the whole of the middle of the block. The rest of the plan had to scurry around it, blind and lightless.

Bryan Avery was asked to try to restructure or relocate the school 16 years ago, but after many different proposals and changes of strategy, it was only when the Arts Council of England found [pound]22 million from the Lottery in 1995 that a design could be finalized, and a further [pound]10 million raised from private sources. [1] Avery Associates' design shows that the long years of waiting were not wasted. It is a masterpiece of compression, translating a very complex brief into a set of varied interlocking spaces as complex as any ever imagined by Adolf Loos.

Avery's strategy retains the two entrances but links them. On Gower Street, the facade is kept, complete with the chaste masks of Comedy and Tragedy by Alan Durst. Below these is the academic entrance for students and staff. The public side, which gives access to the theatres, is on Malet Street, and here, the transformation is immediately apparent. A generous front in white glass curves out to form porches for the two main entrance doors. Above the curve is the blank wall of the fly-tower of the new main theatre, [2] which is carefully proportioned in terracotta panels almost as a rebuke to the yawning pinched tedium of the local '30s stretched neo-Georgian style. In contrast to these, RADA's new front radiates welcome and generosity, though it scrupulously sticks to planning requirements that it should be no taller than its seven-storey neighbours.

Nearly all of the existing fabric on the site has been demolished, though the GBS Theatre and most rooms on that front onto Gower Street have been retained. Avery's have turned the parti round, by putting the flytower of the main theatre on the street side, instead of in the middle of the block. The route between the two entrances runs under the Jerwood Vanbrugh and celebrates visitors' arrival with a mixture of box office, bar and cafe. Amazingly, the architects have even managed to incorporate a lift for carrying large sets as well as the statutory one for people. The massive concrete floor of the theatre provides acoustic isolation from the bar below. By pulling the big space right up to the Malet Street front, the architects have been able to make a chasm in the middle of the composition through which daylight floods down from the barrel-vaulted roof to the foyer, and even below that, through a glass floor down to GBS level and the basement workshops, where stagecraft is taught.

Defined by the curves of the backs of the Jerwood Vanbrugh, and the new black-box John Gielgud Studio Theatre which has been conjured out of the middle of the site, this light gulch is one of the most spectacular new small spaces in London, Soanian in intensity. The chasm really works. When I was there, on a grey winter day, its luminance pulled past the bar toward the main stair to the Jerwood Vanbrugh, which is, because of the nature of the site and building regulations, a rather compressed and claustrophobic affair. No room here for elegant public promenades, but that part of theatre-going experience has already been experienced downstairs. Small oriel windows on the corridors which flank the chasm on the south side make what could have been very nasty institutional spaces cheerful and quietly invite informal conversation.

The Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre is a wonderful new public place. Its form is based on an unexecuted 1639 design by Inigo Jones for a theatre for Sir William Davenant, in which the spherical form of the auditorium intersects with the cylindrical volume of the stage and its flytower (a very early covered theatre project for England, but some 60 years after Palladio's Teatro Olimpico was built in Vicenza). Working with lain Mackintosh of Theatre Projects, the architects have produced a remarkably flexible theatre. Its concept may have been influenced by Jones, but its rigorous execution, both geometric and constructional, far surpasses anything Jones could have envisaged. The 200 seat theatre has the intimacy he proposed, with a pit and two horse-shoe galleries (the latter with all their modern services almost unbelievably packed into 2.25m floor heights). But Jones could not possibly have envisioned the flexibility of the space, which can be changed from thrust to proscenium, apron to in-the-round. Multiple hinge d flaps on each side of the stage can create many different proscenia. A hydraulically powered sevenpiece floor allows the whole base of the space to be altered from being totally flat to having an orchestra pit or a podium.

The architects have made a place which challenges imagination. If RADA can be equally creative, its house in one of the more turgid parts of central London will become one of the most sought after spots in the capital, and of course an excellent nursery for emerging talent.

1. The new building itself cost [pound]17million -- the rest of the money went to cover fit out, end the cost of temporary relocation, to funding a nearby annex of rehearsal rooms, and to academic targets like establishing bursaries.

2. Renamed the Jerwood Vanbrugh to mark the generous contribution from the Jerwood Foundation.

Architect

Avery Associates Architects, London

Project team

Bryan Avery (design director), John Dawson (construction director), Amanda Henderson (project architect), Garry Reynolds (site architect), Jo Podmore, James Lasher, Julien Odile. Kim wan Lee, Mike Neal, Tom Hewitt, Mark Greenberg

Project manager

Buro Four Project Services

Theatre consultants

Theatre Projects Consultants

Structural engineer

Ove Amp & Partners

Quantity surveyor

Davis Langdon & Everest

Acoustic consultant

Paul Gillieron Acoustic Design

Planning supervisor

Faithful & Gould

Photographs

Mark Tapper, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8

Richard Bryant/Arcaid, 1, 5

1. New public entrance from Malet Street. Oriel windows over double entrances allow students to gaze down over their visitors.

2. Looking down on new Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre through grid for lighting workers. Compact form and flexible construction offer many arrangement alternatives.

3,4. Detailing is workmanlike and economical -- but elegant and very carefully thought-through.

5. New public foyer and bar: a welcoming public space which, unlike its predecessor, is acoustically isolated from theatres.

6. Gulch brings daylight to middle of very deep plan.

7. Glass floor at lobby level takes daylight and glimpse of sky down to lower floor.

8. One of the ingenious entrances on Malet Street: extremely compact, but welcoming.