We see the best cultural buildings, modern and historic, as welcoming and generous ‘hosts’ to artists and audiences, places where creatives have the freedom to make and share their work. Producing theatre companies such as Malmö Stadsteater often have a complex push pull relationship with their buildings, especially with historic buildings, as the buildings’ architecture both sets the way the organisation can announce itself to the city, and influences how the show, indeed how the actor engages with the audience. These needs of welcome, porosity, access and artistic creative freedom evolve over time: Theatres now want and need to make themselves explicitly welcoming and accessible to all, porous to the city street. Directors and actors want to be able to shape their performance more individually around a particular show, often wanting to bring the performance closer to the audience.

 

The Malmo Hipp, built in 1899, funded by the people of Malmo, was built as an exuberant fun palace for the city, initially with a circus space, billiard rooms, tea rooms and ballrooms, then progressively over the decades adapting with the times as a mix of restaurant, nightclub, theatre, and at one point even a church. The building has morphed and adapted as society has changed, but always keeping to its founding purpose as a meeting place for the people of Malmo. Whilst much of the original building fabric remains and is intrinsically historical valuable, the deeper value is in its ongoing cultural role as a good host to the people of Malmo. 

 

In Theatre design, making great creative space is not necessarily about clearing away imperfections and nuances, these are often the very things which give a place its genius loci, its sense of place. Rather, it is about gaining a deep understanding of the artistic needs of the theatre company, re-thinking space to free up possibilities and making the larger bold moves needed to realign the building narratively with the ethos of the company. At Malmo Hipp this was done through a combination of decluttering and re-exposing fabric that had been covered over though numerous small scale delicate moves together with some big fundamental moves to allow vital fundamental change, such as making a new connection to the city street and reshaping the auditorium to radically improve theatrical flexibility and the actor – audience relationship. The previously hidden theatre now has a big picture window into a café and children’s making space. The auditorium has been fully remodelled to allow format flexibility and greater actor – audience intimacy. The building has another layer in its long cultural memory.

 

There is sometimes an assumption that conservation groups and statutory bodies, the custodians of our historic fabric, are an obstacle to change. But our experience, in the UK and in Malmo, is to the contrary. As guardians of historic cultural buildings, they rightly rigorously interrogate change, but that rigour often clarifies the design and is often embraced if  the overarching need for change respects the character of the building and, vitally,  keeps the building working as a culturally relevant and potent host.

 
Rather than seeing historic cultural buildings as ‘difficult’, we should perhaps see them as places that only become difficult if they are allowed to ossify. To us conservation of our historic cultural buildings, by far the most sustainable way forward, is more about conserving cultural effectiveness and the ability to host generations of creatives and audiences, as it is about conservation of building fabric. Retaining Cultural effectiveness is after all the best way of ensuring the long term futures of our treasured historic cultural buildings.