In 1970, Howell Killick Partridge Amis (HKPA) designed a theatre for the Young Vic company, an off-shoot of the Old Vic, that would create a new kind of theatre for a new generation - one that was unconventional, classless, open, circus-like and cheap. Arranged around an old butchers shop (a lone survivor of wartime bombing), the new theatre was built at a cost of £60,000 and was only intended to last for just five years. Although becoming one of Europe’s most important producing houses, the building itself had outgrown its informal beginnings. In the early 2000s, architects Haworth Tompkins won a competition to significantly expand and rework the site, re-imagining a new theatre grown around the auditorium, adding an enlarged foyer bar, two new studio theatres and much improved support spaces. Dingle Price and Alex Gore of Pricegore, talk to Steve Tompkins of Haworth Tompkins, about the unique design process for the renewed theatre.

Dingle Price and Alex Gore are founding directors of Pricegore, an architecture practice that seeks to respond to the particularities of contemporary economic, environmental, cultural and social conditions.

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