The highlight of Aviva Studios for Ellen van Loon is the bathroom. “I’m going to take you to the toilets first. I know it’s weird, but we’re going to go there anyway,” she says on the official opening day, as she begins a guided tour of the building. Van Loon, a partner at Rem Koolhaas’s international architectural firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has spent the past eight years working as the lead architect on Manchester’s latest and largest cultural complex, where Free Your Mind, a new musical by award-winning director Danny Boyle, was premiering.
Aviva Studios is a 13,350 sq m complex composed of three parts: a theatre, known as the hall; a warehouse; and two towers. Van Loon describes it as a “collage of former industrial buildings that Manchester is famous for. We basically just assembled was in the city in October to meet with Van Loon and Low Kee Hong, Factory International’s creative director.
