Illustrating a new cultural asset in a world heritage setting.

This competition-winning scheme by David Chipperfield Architects will create an iconic new concert hall in the St Andrews area of Edinburgh, a city with a rich cultural heritage that plays host to the world’s largest performing arts festival every year.

The Dunard Centre will meet a long-standing need in the city for a purpose-built, medium-sized performance venue, and will be the base for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. New spaces will host a range of events and musical performances, both acoustic and amplified. The venue will contain a 1,000-seat auditorium and upon completion will be Edinburgh’s first dedicated new space for music and the performing arts in 100 years.

We created a suite of internal and external views to support the planning application for the scheme and address the challenges of communicating a new-build project set within Edinburgh’s UNESCO World Heritage Site. Given that this is a project of national significance for Scotland, we wanted to ensure that light, materials and colours were appropriate for the region, and combined the accuracy required for planning images with the illustrative qualities necessary to show the exceptional design of this new cultural space.

The heart of the project is its highly adaptable concert hall. Our detailed images show both the variety of auditorium configurations and uses, and the quality and materials of the internal spaces. The strong civic significance of the development demanded a more bespoke approach towards showing how people would use these spaces, so we used simulation technology to create realistic audiences in realistic positions for different types of performances.

Lighting was also a significant factor for a scheme set in such a sensitive heritage context. We worked with the very best photography to create a verified timelapse and show how the scheme transitioned from day to night, softly glowing against the skyline of the city after dark to signal a beacon for the arts.

Project Collaborators:

Photography: Jeremy Young