In fact, OMA’s building contends with a road beneath it (a pair of purpose-built vehicle lifts allow for two 50-ton trucks, with trailers up to 40 feet long, to access the Warehouse), and an elevated railway line incorporated into it (its 19th-century brick arches a stunning backdrop for the ground-floor loo).

By embracing these conditions, OMA’s design fits so discreetly into its surroundings that, approaching the building on foot from either side, you might not notice it at all. Even the faceted Hall, with all its jagged edges, only comes fully into view when seen from the river.

“These new high-rises changed the whole area,” says van Loon. “But, when we started here, there were a lot of warehouses, and we wanted to keep that heritage.” Using “the most simple material you can imagine,” van Loon clad the Hall and rear towers in corrugated metal. For the Warehouse facades, she went a step further, reappropriating corrugated sheet piles, utilized for flood defense in riverbanks and dikes, often in steel but in this case precast concrete. “I really love that material,” she adds, noting, “It’s so Manchester.” (And Dutch.)

Things are kept simple inside as well, with interiors, including the expansive lobby and back-of-house spaces, as stripped down as possible. Pops of color enliven artist areas in the towers, however, and the theater seating’s bright yellow velvet upholstery is a welcome surprise.

But at the heart of the complex is a blank canvas. At 108 feet wide, 210 feet long, and nearly 70 feet high—with a theater grid spanning the entirety of the area—the Warehouse provides tremendous flexibility for exhibitions but, more so, for ballet, theater, music, and cross-art performances. Supersize movable “multiwalls” enable a number of configurations within the vast space. By “plugging into” the Hall, that auditorium’s stage can be extended deep into the Warehouse.

Long before it was complete, the building had been activated several times, particularly during MIF earlier this year, with an installation of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s giant inflatables, and during the festival in 2021, when British theatrical director Deborah Warner staged a sound-and-light installation. For the opening production after the building was inaugurated in October, Manchester’s own Danny Boyle specially created a performance that incorporates dance and immersive design to stretch across the building’s flexible spaces.

Aviva Studios’ location within the center of the city—and now in close proximity to a rising residential development—presented challenges, however, with respect to noise control. The design team provided sound insulation by creating an acoustic cavity, which doubles as circulation space around the Warehouse, between two layers of thick concrete.

The Arts Council England made the biggest investment in the national agency’s history by contributing 50 percent of the cost to build Aviva Studios—a price tag that, at just under $300 million, ballooned with the construction’s progressing through Covid delays and other obstacles, but one that is still considerably less than similar performing arts buildings recently completed in the U.S. By comparison, New York’s newly opened and also ultraflexible Perelman Performing Arts Center, by OMA alum Joshua Ramus of REX, cost upward of $500 million (though that building, at the World Trade Center site, rests atop even more complex infrastructure and is wrapped in 5,000 marble panels, not corrugated metal and sheet piles). The cost for the Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University, also by REX and, again, ultraflexible, was not disclosed, but one can safely assume that the technology and mechanisms needed to make these spaces so flexible come with a heavy price tag. The question remains, “Is it worth it?”

These three projects, opened within a month of each other, will either make the case for all that flexibility, or against it.