UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects

UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - FacadeUK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - Chair, Beam, WindowsUK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - FacadeUK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - FacadeUK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - More Images+ 18

Text description provided by the architects. Like the art of carnival itself, Ash Sakula’s new UK Carnival Arts Centre in downtown Luton is ‘strange, shambolic and magnificent’.

UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - Image 6 of 23
© Ash Sakula Architects

It consists of two new buildings astride a large courtyard with a continuous enclosing perimeter, part brickwork, part screen, both 4.5m high. Two large gates, one gold, one stainless steel mesh, break the enclosure at either end of the courtyard, a courtyard which is transformed into a street as part of the carnival route.

UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - Facade
© Ash Sakula Architects

The larger mas camp building houses performance spaces, a state of the art workshop, teaching spaces and café. The smaller building hosts administrative offices, the national carnival archive, incubator units and a crèche. The courtyard is a both-and space: a green conversational lung, a spillover space for workshop and performance and a new street for carnival.

UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - Windows, Facade
© Ash Sakula Architects

The brief asked for a building that reflects ‘the spirit of carnival’. To us that meant capturing some of the kinetic energy and materiality of carnival. Our choice of materials was led by this ambition, for the building to engender a sense of making and experimentation and a tactile, textural quality.

UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - Windows, Beam
© Ash Sakula Architects

And yet, while the façade craved attention it didn’t want to be an essay in tricksy bling. Like architects, carnival artists have a deep interest in materials. They work at the edge of possibility, designing kinetic structures the size of houses light enough to be carried all day on someone’s back. They are not a lay audience: they know when a junction is fudged. To win their respect the construction had to be well done, to be tough and robust and have some serious logic behind its playfulness.

drawing 04

We chose two bricks, a smooth blue engineering brick and a white, with a thin 5mm glued joint. The glued brickwork forms a continuous wrap round the main building, broken only by full height display windows. Ikat patterns in white brick, based on samba acoustic rhythms, are stitched into the blue brick on either side of each opening, creating a rhythm that stretches the eye right around the building.

UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - Facade
© Ash Sakula Architects

The parts of the building that face the courtyard are a loose composition of separate elements using a multitude of materials: gold and silver metal cladding, timber, glass, brick and stainless steel. Together they create a village of different architectural forms, rather than a single piece of architecture.

UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects - Facade
© Ash Sakula Architects

Above it all spinning sky signs spell out ‘carnival arts’. And like carnival dancers they sometimes spin so fast you are not quite sure what it is you are seeing.

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Project location

Address:Luton, UK

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Location to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.
About this office
Cite: "UK Centre For The Carnival Arts / Ash Sakula Architects" 14 Feb 2012. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/207307/uk-centre-for-the-carnival-acts-ash-sakula-architects> ISSN 0719-8884

© Ash Sakula Architects

英国狂欢节艺术中心 / Ash Sakula Architects

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