2 Royal Avenue
2RA is a collaborative meanwhile project turning a grade B+ Listed building into a new type of indoor public space in Belfast city centre. This building adaptation has created spaces for children's play, learning and changing areas, events space, art galleries, a social enterprise cafe and flexible workspace which has brought new life and activity to the high street. The project includes work to improve the existing building fabric as well as new installations within the space that were made in collaboration with Northern Irish artists.
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Client: Belfast City Council
Collaborator: MMAS
Artists: Jonathan Ross, Beth Milligan + Lyndsey McDougall
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Civic Trust Awards: Winner
Pineapple Awards: Shortlist
2 Royal Avenue is a grade B+ listed building designed by the significant local architect William J. Barre for the Belfast branch of the Provincial Bank of Ireland. The building was used as a bank up until the mid nineties when it was extended and utilised as a Tesco supermarket. It became available for sale in 2021, and Belfast City Council had concerns that the building would sit empty for a long period and might begin to fall into disrepair. There has been a significant problem in Belfast with buildings being land-banked by developers and becoming derelict (as well as heritage buildings succumbing to arson attacks). 2 Royal Avenue was too significant a building to risk losing and to their great credit the council acted quickly to buy the building. They did this prior to deciding the exact programme or future use of the building. However, they saw an opportunity to secure a new space at the historic centre of Belfast that could inform the trajectory for the future identity and use of this city centre high street.
Given the Listed Building status, lack of time and limited budget, the team used a combination of targeted alterations to the existing fabric alongside demountable installations within the interior. The architects worked with artists Beth Milligan and Lyndsey McDougall (textiles) and Jonathan Ross (timber sculpture) to reimagine the interior space, creating inhabitable forms at ground level and an installation of cotton screens floating above. To maximise the impact of the installations, the team pushed for existing windows to be reinstated to bring in daylight and for the existing ribbed concrete soffit to be exposed, which had the dual effect of raising the ceiling height and exorcising the space of its supermarket memories, giving the installations a raw backdrop of exposed services.
The interior installations form an inhabitable landscape in the extension which - through enabling a sense of compartmentalisation and partial enclosure - can be used informally, as cafe or picnic spot, occupied as flexible workspace but simultaneously explored by children and families. A cluster of the forms at the centre of this space houses the cafe kiosk to draw people into this previously underused room. The hand dyed, fabric screens hung simply from tensile wires relate to the installation below by setting up playful sightlines and views for children and adults as they sit or stand at different heights within the space. Manipulating sightlines enables intimate-feeling pockets of space to exist within one open-plan room. The fabric also helps to soften sound reverberation. Overall, the combination of elements helps the space to feel public through a spatial informality and encourages people to inhabit the building in a variety of ways.
Image Above: Belfast Trusses speaking to each other across Time
Impact
It has become clear since the 2RA installation was opened that a large proportion of people in Belfast benefit from and are drawn to shared, sheltered space in the city centre. It is a new type of urban space for Belfast that previously did not exist, enabling a mix of public activities including cyclical art exhibitions, a market, musical performances, flexible workspace and a children's play area. A social enterprise cafe at the heart of the space is a consistent draw and maintains a comfortable level of occupancy, but importantly people are actively encouraged to spend time in the space (staff are employed to facilitate this) regardless of whether they intend to spend money or bring in their own snacks. This is supported by the provision of books and children’s toys within the installations curated by the council, plug sockets, deskspace, free WiFi and even a grand piano free for anybody to play.
Since its repurposing, 2RA has hosted or programmed thousands of events and workshops. There is a creative programme which engages with local communities through art classes and various workshops. Through this, the project has provided paid opportunities to over 80 local cultural professionals including musicians, artists, dancers, writers and performers. It hosted 9 art exhibitions that featured in excess of 60 local artists both professional and at an amateur level. So far, events held at 2RA include tea dances, Scottish and Irish dancing, public consultations, advocacy group meet ups, and council meetings. The central cafe is run by Yallaa, a social enterprise born out of a passion to promote arabic culture in NI and helps asylum seekers and refugees gain training and employment in the catering and events industry. Welcoming its 200,000th visitor in August, this project has already successfully demonstrated that interior spaces on the high street for public interaction and shelter should be part of any future plans for Belfast in order to bring people back into the city and breath new life into its vacant buildings.
Awards:
Civic Trust Awards: Winner
Pineapple Awards: Shortlist
Publications:
Perspective: January 2024
Process
Cocreation with artists:
Installations within the existing building were co-created with artists. There are two types of installation that work together to transform the existing space: inhabitable timber structures that grow up from the floor to a maximum height of 1.8 metres cocreated with artist Jonathan Ross, and fabric screens that come down from the ceiling to meet the timber structures, cocreated with Beth Milligan and Lyndsey McDougall. The architects and artists worked through physical and digital models in order to collaborate on the design of each element.
Creating intimacy within a large, public room:
One of the biggest challenges of this project was to turn a relatively soulless room designed to house a supermarket into a place where people would choose to spend time in. Key to this was to disrupt the scale of the space, which was large and empty. At the same time, as an interior public space, maximum visibility had to be maintained for safety and accessibility. As a solution, inhabitable timber structures were designed to carve out smaller spaces that rarely reached a height over 1.2m. Therefore, when seated, a visitor would feel a sense of enclosure, but the majority of visitors would be able to see across the space when standing up. Secondly, fabric screens made of cotton come down to lightly touch the timber structures below. With a slight transparency, the screens further add to the sense of human-scale enclosure, without fully compartmentalising the space. This intervention also helps reduce reverberation in this large room.
