Headingley pavilion: Boycott, Illingworth, Close – and Alsop

You cannot miss Alsop Sparch’s new pavilion at Headingley Carnegie stadium. Headingley itself is a leafy, residential neighbourhood to the north of Leeds primarily comprised of two-storey red-brick Victorian terraces, pitched roofs and students. None of which prepares you for the emergence of the striking pavilion, a green, chamfered, mollusc-like apparition in the midst of trees, gables and semi-suburbia.

As the stand nears completion, (handover is scheduled for this month), it is now clear that Alsop Sparch’s striking structure does not merely provide improved facilities for an iconic cricket venue. It is also making a whole series of bold, futuristic and intriguing statements about the relationship between old and new, building and context and city and culture.

A unique joint venture has made such an audacious statement possible. The Headingley Carnegie stadium may indeed be the home of Yorkshire County Cricket Club (YCCC). But the lead client for its redevelopment is the Leeds Metropolitan University. Accordingly, as well as the new stand housing all the facilities and amenities one would normally expect of a modern sports stadium, it also provides substantial teaching space for the university’s Tourism, Hospitality and Events faculty, one of the foremost schools of its kind in the country.

As Stewart Regan, chief executive of YCCC, bluntly explains, “without a partner, we simply would not have been able to deliver this project”. Economically, the unique collaboration clearly made sense. Of the total budget of £21m, Leeds Metropolitan provided £14m whereas YCCC contributed £7m. However, £4m of this was grant-aided by the Yorkshire Forward regional development agency and contingent upon a public sector partner being found.

Equally, with an estimated student population of almost 200,000 (second only to London) higher education is one of the city’s biggest industries. Leeds Metropolitan University itself is one of the largest developers in the city and is in the process of consolidating and improving its multiple property holdings.

Its previous projects have included the distinctive Rose Bowl development at Hampshire County Cricket Club and Feilden Clegg Bradley’s Broadcasting Place, both of which are in the city centre. Crucially, Bam, the main contractor on the Rose Bowl, also built Headingley Carnegie. This enabled the redeployment of several established relationships and personnel onto Headingley. Simon Fearn, Leeds Metropolitan University’s capital projects manager, said this “provided a continuity that was key to addressing the complex operational requirements the dual client brief demanded”.

With a global test match TV audience of 500 million, Headingley will be the most viewed Yorkshire building in the world

Stewart Regan, YCCC

Externally, the four-storey stand, (five-storey if we acknowledge the lower and upper ground floors), appears to be two separate, architecturally distinct buildings. The “public” or street facade to the north faces Kirkstall Lane while the “private” facade at the south looks out onto the cricket ground. It is the street frontage that provides the building’s most distinctive features, a series of perforated, triangular metal panels.

Four layers of this patterning are applied, with the lowest slightly taller and the uppermost significantly shallower than the middle two. At various points, a triangular panel is replaced by a window of the same shape. This triangular grid also wraps round the stand’s side west elevation.

The footprint of the entire building curves away from the street edge, allowing the insertion of a small landscaped plaza in between and for the block to be significantly set back from its closest neighbouring residential property.

The rear (south) facade replaces the triangular pattern with a sheer, inclined glazed curtain wall. The wall has a chequered, orthogonal pattern that is formed by an irregular grid of clear and opaque glazed panels. A cantilevered box that forms an internal auditorium protrudes from the centre of the elevation and is mimicked by additional pairs of more modest, linear balconies elsewhere on the facade.

At the bottom, leaning columns cantilever the lowest tier out over the existing rows of ground-side seating underneath. And at the top, the triangular metal panels of the street facade emerge as an overhanging roof, a momentary, hood-like reminder of the building’s signature aesthetic.

Undoubtedly, the introduction of Alsop Sparch’s provocative, abstract forms into a primarily Victorian, residential local streetscape was always going to invite controversy and divide opinion. This building, particularly its triangular metal panels, clearly and quite deliberately does not “fit in” to its surroundings.

But there are several ways for buildings to relate to context and contrast can be as powerful as harmony. There is a certain surreal, melodramatic quality to seeing this strange, quasi-organic chameleon emerge from behind a pitched roof or peek over a narrow chimney. Incongruity, if handled well, can induce excitement and spontaneity.

Does it do so here? Almost. The architect and project team claim to have taken great care to ensure that the building respects its context and immediate surroundings. For one thing, it is sunk below ground level. Its footprint is peeled away from the street edge to provide landscaped space and avoid overshadowing houses. The metallic panels have been subtly coloured in various shades of green to reflect the hue and texture of surrounding trees.

And in order to be sympathetic to residential properties, its east elevation, only partially visible from the street, reveals significant upper floor set-backs and is also entirely clad in a full height cedar “trellis” over which climbing vines are eventually intended to form a “living wall”.

But the building appears too disparate and fragmented to work convincingly as a whole. With the exception of the southern roof overhang, each part - the cedar wall, the triangular faceting, the street frontage ground-floor glazing, the south curtain wall - is articulated as an independent entity with little relation to its neighbouring zones or, ultimately the overall building. The resultant junctions between various planes therefore seem awkward.

The cedar wall is a case in point. Of course the attempt to mitigate the impact of a much larger building on its smaller neighbours is appropriate, even if the whiff of planning intervention lingers. But by introducing an elevational treatment and material that is entirely absent from the rest of the building, the efforts are trivialised and the unity of the overall composition undermined.

A comprehensive and complex operational strategy had to be in place to separate everything - such as the independent metering of services to ensure that we don’t end up paying for YCCC’s consumption

Simon Fearn, Leeds Metropolitan

Furthermore, on the metal clad street frontage, it seems strange to apply an abstract facade pattern, and then have it conform to the structural floor heights behind it. This concession is at its most uncomfortable with the additional height of the first-floor panels. The same floor height requirement is imposed on the irregular chequered grid on the sheer incline curtain wall to the south, creating a confused visual stalemate that is too haphazard to be ordered yet too regularised to be random. This effect is most evident from a distance.

It is internally where the enormous efforts taken to provide dual accommodation and satisfy the joint client brief become most evident. The fact that only two internal spaces - Leeds Metropolitan’s administrative offices and the ground floor teaching kitchens - are allocated for the sole use of the university is undoubtedly an impressive achievement. It is also testament to the imagination and flexibility of the design response.

All other principal areas have been adapted to offer dual functions. Radio studios double as staff or student meeting rooms and the 150-seat lecture theatre can be converted into an auditorium for 100 journalists. Simon Fearn points out that the dual uses required an “extra level of thinking to be applied to all aspects of the design. A comprehensive and complex operational strategy had to be in place to separate everything, from the independent metering of services to ensure that we don’t end up paying for YCCC’s consumption to a rigorous security plan that controls access between areas”.

As most of the cricket season occurs during the summer academic recess, Fearn expects only a “one in 12 chance” of a clash in schedule requirements between each client. “It’s impossible to plan for every eventuality,” he continues, “but it’s something we’re prepared to monitor and if necessary adapt.”

It is clear that YCCC and Leeds Metropolitan view their stand as an economic and cultural tool. For the YCCC its primary function is to keep international test cricket - and the lucrative financial revenues and civic prestige this generates - within Yorkshire. But both clients also appear determined to provide a new icon for a city keen to place contemporary architecture at the heart of its cultural fabric. Regan points out that with a global audience of 500 million, Headingley will be “the most viewed Yorkshire building in the world”.

The opportunities this presents for projecting Leeds’s image to the outside world are obvious. Both clients are to be commended for adopting bold and uncompromisingly contemporary architecture as the means to enhance the city’s reputation and Headingley’s iconic status. But perhaps the real success story is the project’s emphasis on collaboration. This stadium shows how dual and not necessarily related uses can be incorporated into a single development.

By adopting such an innovative comprehensive operational and accommodation strategy throughout the building, the project team has ensured that it is in the best position possible to deliver the flexibility required by the joint client brief without compromising the spirit of the design. In these times of severe economic stringency, this progressive partnership process may well be Headingley Carnegie’s most enduring legacy.