Mac is back as Midlands Arts Centre prepares to reopen

Mar 7 2010 By Lorne Jackson

Lorne Jackson goes behind the scenes to see what the future holds for the revamped Midlands Arts Centre.

On entering the refurbished Mac building, in Cannon Hill Park, the first thought to flash through my mind is who dumped a forest in the foyer?

Okay, it’s not quite a forest. Just a triumph of trees, plus a rampage of rolling hills that look like they’re about to roll over me.

Then I figure out what has happened.

The countryside hasn’t invaded the Midlands Art Centre. (If you want a genuine tale featuring an army of trespassing trees, you’d be better off reading Macbeth, not roaming the Mac.) Instead, the new design – incorporating expansive windows – has opened up the building visually, giving the visitor plenty of spectacular views of the surrounding park.

The interior is bright, spacious and airy. This was not the case in the past. Before the revamp, the Mac was as bright, spacious and airy as Winston Churchill’s War Room. And it had more gloomy nooks and crevices than Count Dracula’s guest bedroom.

There was something shabby, sullen and Soviet about the design and decor. It had the Brezhnev blues.

Now Glasnost has come to the Mac. This truly is the era of openness.

So open, in fact, that the management team have agreed to show me round the building, a few weeks before its official relaunch on May 1.

During my sneak-peek visit, I note that it’s not just the windows that create an impression of transparency. The staircases and hallways continue the theme. This would be a devil of a building to indulge in a game of hide and seek.

How things have changed. The building that closed for renovation in April, 2008, was very different.

The Mac was a mess. It wasn’t the fault of any one architect. Various buildings had been added and connected during a 40-year period. They were all at different levels; and with no lifts, wheel-chair and baby-buggy access was limited to a tiny percentage of the centre.

Degradation also set in. Over the crushing decades, any sharp edges the building once sported sagged, slumped and flagged. I, for one, found this lack of coherence and drabness off-putting. Although the Mac offered a wide range of creative activities for all ages, I usually dodged the place. Everything seemed so exhausted and apologetic.

The redevelopment by Mac, in partnership with the city-based South Asian arts organisation, Sampad, was ten years on the drawing board, while a saga of funding setbacks and budget cuts raged around it.

The main challenge for concept architects Branson Coates, who handed over to Chetwood Architects, was to iron out the kinks caused by the random growth of the complex, opening up larger and more coherent circulation areas, while bringing the building up to date with modern standards of accessibility.

As well as the wide windows, bringing branches and brightness, there is a new entrance reached by a new bridge across the River Rea. The bridge is flat and easy for wheel chairs to traverse, unlike the still-present hump bridge which was once the main route of access.

Inside, lifts have been added.

Mac director Dorothy Wilson says: “The main entrance is now much more visible than the previous one. And we’ve really tackled the problem we had with accessibility.

“Now, there is one hundred per cent access to 98 per cent of the sight.”

Dorothy is also proud of the expansiveness of the revised building.

“There’s such a sense of scale, now,” she says. “People will have the feeling that they can go off and explore, which wasn’t the case before. We’ve also brought the park into the centre, and the centre into the park.

“The choice of materials used in the building also gives that impression. All natural materials have been used. The floors are made from quarried stone tiles. What we had before was tacky carpets.”

Dorothy gives me the grand tour of the grand building.

She shows me the new cafe, where much of the food on offer will be freshly baked on the premises, and locally sourced. Fair trade will also be a focus.

There is another bar at the end of the hall and in between is a large gallery, where art will be displayed.

But it won’t just be paintings on the walls. Plasma TVs will be hung in seven or eight locations. Another aspect of openness, the Mac’s grand theme.