Bold, brazen and bling, Leeds' £60m new venue looks like a giant bug – but is a strangely appropriate addition to the city
A mysterious green creature has appeared in Leeds city centre, rearing its scaly head above the surrounding rooftops. Surveying the scene with rows of hexagonal eyes, this faceted hulk squats at the back of a new piazza like a supersized robot aphid, come to take over the city. This is the £60m Leeds Arena by Populous architects – one of the oddest looking buildings the region has ever seen.
The arena's bizarre form might best be explained by the story behind the council's original competition, won in 2010 by Acme architects with a scheme based on the diagram of an insect's eyeball. Just as the eye's compound receptors taper in a fan-shape to channel information back to the optic nerve, suggested the architects, so would the energy of the stage burst outwards in a mass of hexagonal lenses across the arena's facade. It was an elaborate conceit for the underlying problem of how to decorate a massive shed in the middle of the city.
"We were a bit paranoid about slapping such a huge building in the centre of town," says John Rhodes of events specialist Populous, which took over the project when the operator, SMG, held its own competition for a more experienced practice to deliver the scheme. Rhodes describes how his team looked to the precedent of dazzle camouflage, used to disguise ships during the first world war, as a way of breaking down the building's bulk and "collaging it with the urban tapestry".
Today, walking towards the site from any angle, it is hard to say the arena dissolves into the background; but it is dazzling. Located in the northern quarter of the city centre, behind the ailing 1960s Merrion Centre shopping complex, and framed by a low-slung casino and the brutalist granite castle of the Yorkshire Bank headquarters, the giant green helmet is hard to miss. Rising to 35m, it has a skin of aluminium shingles, coloured in medicinal shades of mint and pistachio. As it wraps around the building, this mottled shell is prised open to form a series of geometric layers in which hexagonal windows have been punched. These windows are in turn glazed with a kaleidoscope of tinted glass panels.
It is a lot for the eye to digest by day, but by night the lurid exterior moves to a whole new level. With a combination of illuminated tracery, throbbing back-lit mesh and spotlights shining through the windows, the building is transformed into a psychedelic technicolour dreamboat. It is a wonderfully tacky 80s disco extravaganza, with slanting lines of light reminiscent of the lo-fi retro-futuristic language of Tron.
"We wanted to create a dynamic facade on a shoestring," says Rhodes, describing the project as something of an "austerity arena", built in the depths of recession. It works out at £4,800 per seat, he says, compared to around £8,000 at the O2 Arena in Greenwich. To achieve bling on a budget, the main ingredient is light, providing an everchanging chameleonic billboard depending on the event. "It could be green for Green Day, purple for Prince or pink for Pink!" trumpets the council's website. It remains to be seen how they will interpret the name of the opening performer, Bruce Springsteen, in July (though his songs Pink Cadillac and Red Headed Woman might provide inspiration).
Within, the 12,500 seats are arranged in a simple wedge-shaped amphitheatre, apparently modelled on the ancient Greek theatre at Epidaurus – which has the same distance from the furthest seat to the stage of around 65m. It is a compact, intimate affair that both bands and audiences will enjoy, compared to cavernous arenas like the O2 where the most distant seat is over 100m from the stage. The theatre form also takes advantage of the natural slope of the land, requiring little excavation to create the expansive top-fed three-tier bowl, while servicing is neatly handled round the back, where the site meets the concrete gulley of the city's inner ring road.
Hosting everything from rock concerts to wrestling, Disney on Ice and Cirque du Soleil, the interior has been designed with ultimate flexibility: "We see it as a machine for delivering entertainment," says Rhodes, describing how the lower level of the bowl is entirely retractable, allowing the operators to create "a massive mosh pit" (in fine Leeds tradition) that can be safely observed from a balcony level above.
The ancillary spaces are simple affairs with exposed steel structure and blockwork walls, while the circulation has been carefully designed to bring a sense of drama to the arrival area. A great double-backing staircase rises through the open triple-height lobby, connecting the three concourse levels with an almost baroque theatricality, while the big hexagonal windows provide views out across the city to the moors beyond.
Standing on the upper level, looking across Leeds' motley skyline – from stately Victorian spires to the try-hard quiffs of modern apartment blocks – the arena begins to make more sense as a piece in the jumbled jigsaw of the city.
"We've never gone in for rigid masterplans," says John Thorp, Leeds' long-serving Civic Architect, who retired last year but continues to chair the design review panel, and was closely involved in the evolution of the arena as the client-side architect. "It's more about the piece-by-piece assembly of a place over the decades."
Among the crayon and felt-tip drawings that line the walls of his office is a plan of the arena in its broader context, drawn as a tapering spot-light bulb. It is screwed into the back corner of the site and projects rays out across a network of public routes and spaces, showing how the arena is stitched into existing patterns of pedestrian movement in the city centre.
"There was much debate about putting an out-of-town type arena in an urban setting," says Thorp. "But the council was always keen to build a city centre venue, and we've tried to make it part of the city's connective tissue."
It should come as no surprise that the arena has its shortfalls: it is the product of three architects, a limited budget and more than 10 years of political and legal wranglings. And such a hefty object is always going to feel shoehorned in an urban context. But now completed, Leeds has a facility it has lacked since 1989 when Queen's Hall was demolished – the former tram depot that hosted the Rolling Stones, the Clash, the Police, Joy Division and Def Leppard in the walls of its modest brick shed. With acts lined up from Elton John to Andrea Bocelli, Stereophonics to Boyzone, the city finally has a modern equivalent with the gaudy costume to match.
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