Salford wins silver

But now might be the time to invest, because 28 April 2000 is the opening date for the Lowry Centre – a £60m landmark lottery project at Salford Quays. The Michael Wilford and Partners-designed theatre and gallery is already starting to attract leisure and retail developers to the area. Combine it with Daniel Libeskind's angular Imperial War Museum just across the dock, and Salford is set to offer stiff competition to rapidly redeveloping central Manchester. On the back of this, house prices seem certain to soar.

Although property speculators can make a killing from the development of the Lowry Centre, it is not so certain that Bovis, construction manager for the project, will do the same. The design has been radically reworked to keep it within budget; on top of which the raking walls make for a long and difficult critical path, many of the materials are bespoke, and the stainless steel shingles that distinguish the project have never been used in Britain before.

However, after a year on site, Bovis project director Peter Roberts is happy with progress on this complex job. "It's difficult to get a yardstick about where we should be because it is such a one-off project," he says. "But one of our surveyors who worked with Laing on the Bridgewater Hall [another big Manchester theatre] says we're doing OK."

Built on the promontory between the Manchester Ship Canal and the Huron Basin, the Lowry Centre looks on plan like a Christmas tree. At the top of the tree is a 450-seat theatre; at the base of the trunk, a 1730-seat lyric theatre (a semicircular theatre with balconies); galleries and cafés form the branches, and a giant canopy is the pot. A huge, silo-like tower next to the entrance will house a new collection of LS Lowry paintings and is intended to be a signpost that can be seen for miles around.

The project was advertised in June 1996 and awarded to Bovis ahead of Mowlem and Laing in December 1996. The deal was signed at 5pm on Christmas eve in time to beat end-of-year funding deadlines. Six months of design development later, Bovis started on site.

The most difficult aspect of the design is the shape of the centre. Behind the entrance canopy, a glazed wall made by Exterior Profiles splays out at an angle of 30º and curves around the entrance from one side of the building to the other. And if that is not enough to give surveyors sleepless nights, the bespoke curtain wall fits into a frame that forms diagonal stripes on the face of the wall. All of the overhangs need to be supported by costly temporary works until completed and the glazing has to be propped until the last pane slides into the wall. This means the whole process is slow and unwieldy compared with flat, straight walls.

"The setting out is critical," says senior construction manager Geoff Bate, younger brother of Bovis North director Dennis Bate. "The glazing has to be lowered into the frame from the inside rather than the outside until the last piece makes the frame stiff.

"Nothing here is straightforward. I can't wait to go and build a shed," he adds.

Is it worth the extra work? Michael Wilford project architect Simon Usher thinks so. He says the slopes provide naval references and the diagonal striping accentuates the leaning.

The design has undergone a series of changes to keep it within the £60m budget. The glass wall and that of the smaller theatre at the top of the building were intended to be made from curved glazing. This had to be sacrificed and now both curves are formed by faceted curtain walling.

The biggest change to the specification has been in the materials. The original design featured Michael Wilford's trademark mix of rich colours juxtaposed in a variety of old and new materials. For instance, the upper part of the lyric theatre, which sits on the building like the hull of a ship waiting to be finished, was meant to be clad in purple metal. Now it is clad in steel shingles, like a poor man's Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. Usher, who studied architecture in Manchester, explains that the purple cladding was guaranteed for only 15 years, whereas the steel shingles are guaranteed for 25.

Each part of the building was meant to be a different colour. The colour-coding has not been entirely lost, but instead of being colour-coded on the outside, the building is now colour-coded on the inside. The internal walls are being painted bright colours and lit so that they glow through the curtain walling at night. Unfortunately, the effect will be lost during the day.

Usher is pragmatic about the changes. "We realise there isn't an endless pot of money," he says. "We've got to be responsible. We can't impact on Salford's council tax.

"I don't feel we have compromised our design," he adds. "We are providing solutions – and solutions that no one expects."

Bovis' Roberts takes a slightly different view. "Wilford wants top of the range everywhere, but there has to be a realisation that theatres are technically advanced, more so than a high-tech office, and that getting the technology right has priority over the finishes," he explains.

To make sure the services are spot on, Bovis, services consultant Buro Happold and joint-venture services contractor Haden Young/ABB spent three months working up the design before settling on a guaranteed maximum price of £12m.

With so many changes, keeping the project moving smoothly is difficult. So Roberts has introduced a streamlined "fast fax" method to approve changes. "When a variation comes in, we get the designers to rough out a drawing and fax it to all team members. They aren't allowed to get it back to us later than two weeks after it has been issued," says Roberts.

The fast fax system worked best on rescheduling panic bars for emergency doors. "The fire precaution calculations were wrong, so when design was finalised, we realised there were too few panic bars. The variation and rescheduling of 27 more panic bars was turned around in 48 hours," says Roberts.