The Dunard Centre

Contract Value

Undisclosed

Area

7,600m2

Project Start

2020

Construction Start

2023

Completion Date

2027

Client

IMPACT Scotland

Contract

tbc

Client - IMPACT Scotland

Users - Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Edinburgh International Festival and others

Architect - David Chipperfield Architects London

Architect - Reiach and Hall Architects

Acoustic consultant - Nagata Acoustics (performance space), Sandy Brown (venue)

Theatre consultant - Theatre Project Consultants

AV/IT - Theatre Projects Consultants (performance space), Atelier Ten (venue)

Landscape architect - Gross.Max

Structural engineer - Whitby Wood

Services engineer - Atelier Ten

Sustainability consultant - Atelier Ten

Lighting consultant - Atelier Ten

Fire consultant - Atelier Ten

Vertical transportation - Atelier Ten

Access consultant - Buro Happold

Facade consultant - Thornton Tomassetti

Daylight sunlight consultant - Thornton Tomassetti

CDM advisor - Alliance CDM

Planning consultant - Ryden LLP

Project management - Turner & Townsend

Quantity surveyor - Thomson Gray

Visualisations - Hayes Davidson, David Chipperfield Architects, Reiach and Hall Architects

Working as Executive Architect for David Chipperfield Architects - The Dunard Centre will address the long-identified need for a purpose-built, medium-sized performance venue in the city, serving as an Edinburgh base for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and providing a new space for a range of musical performances. In addition to the main, 1,000-seat auditorium the venue will offer a 200-seat studio for performance, recording and rehearsals, as well as delivering an educational outreach programme. Upon completion, it will be Edinburgh’s first dedicated new space for music and the performing arts in 100 years.

The new venue is located within Edinburgh’s UNESCO World Heritage Site at the eastern end of its Georgian New Town. It replaces an unremarkable office building and abuts the rear of the Grade-A listed Dundas House (1771) on St. Andrew Square. On an urban level the building seeks to do two things: resolve the immediate urban conditions of the site, which is relatively concealed and at the intersection of several distinct neighbourhoods; and provide a fitting terminus at the end of George Street, the New Town’s principal axis, in a position where a grand public building was originally intended to be built.

The building’s functions are distributed within three simple, compact and intersecting volumes. The concert hall sits in the centre of the site within a pure oval volume; its shape and scale dictated by the acoustic requirements. Its elliptical form is topped by a shallow dome – an urban gesture which terminates the axial view east along George Street, with Dundas House prominently in the foreground. The venue’s overlapping lower volumes are orthogonal in form and house its ancillary and public functions. These help to reduce the overall mass of the building and anchor it within the scale, geometry and atmosphere of the surrounding streets and neighbouring buildings. Overall, the venue seeks to form an urban composition centred around Dundas House, in balance with the prominent civic structures at the opposite end of George Street.

The façades of the new venue relate to the architecture of the New Town in both their order and materiality. The expression of a base, middle and top, found on other neoclassical buildings, is picked up by the composition of the venue’s massing while the texture and tone of its concrete picks up the various sandstones found in the New Town. The metal-clad dome completes the crown of the building, announcing its public nature and aligning with the other civic buildings across the city.