King’s College Performing Arts Centre Toi Manawa

Education


Client: King’s College

Architect: Patterson Associates Limited

Location: Ōtāhuhu, Auckland

Completion: 2024

Toi Manawa, translated as ‘The Heart of the Arts’, is evidence of commitment to the arts at King’s College with the construction of this bold new Performing Arts Centre designed by Andrew Patterson. The Centre includes a specialist theatre, dedicated music classrooms, a recording studio, music practice rooms, a dance studio, and an orchestra room.

The new Centre is on a brownfield site and uses the existing school campus infrastructure. Wrapping around the Great Hall, this striking new building complements the heritage of the College, and creates a wonderful gathering place to showcase the College’s performing arts programmes. There is connection to nature through views and the playful quality of daylight, an example of which is the dappled effect changing during the day through the brick screens and foliage.

The façade treatment of the new performance arts centre is orientation sensitive, using high performance glass only where it is needed. A warm roof system, a relatively low window to wall ratio, a large glass to joinery ratio, and walls made of concrete panels help keeping the air infiltration to a minimum. There are multiple synergies between the mass of the building required for acoustics, the increased thermal mass, and the reduced air infiltration rate achieved using precast panels. Despite the acoustic constraints, natural ventilation was used where possible, in the lobby of the ground floor.

In all classrooms, demand control mechanical ventilation is used so the systems run only when students are present and depending on the actual occupancy. The orchestra room, auditorium, and dance studio have separate HVAC systems, so they are deactivated if not in use. In addition, free cooling is implemented to both reduce CO2 levels and reduce energy use. This allows these three spaces to be cooled via 100% outdoor air when conditions are favourable such as for evening performances. The air-conditioning systems have spare plug-and-play capacity should the layouts of the smaller spaces change in the future. The approach was to ‘build clever’ and ‘build efficiently’.