Sage Gateshead
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The Sage Gateshead is a centre for musical education and performance, located in Gateshead on the south bank of the River Tyne, in the north-east of England. It was opened in 2005.
The venue is part of the Gateshead Quays development, which also includes the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge.
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Origins
The centre occupies a "curvy glass and stainless steel" building designed by Lord Foster, with spectacular views of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Tyne Bridge, High Level Bridge and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. The planning and construction process that began in 1994 cost over £70 million, which was raised primarily through National Lottery grants. The centre has a range of patrons, notably The Sage Group plc (by whom the centre was named; the originally proposed title was 'Music Centre Gateshead') who contributed to the building's construction and sponsored its opening weekend.
The venue opened over the weekend 17th-19th December 2004. Rather than open in traditional fashion with a gala concert, The Sage Gateshead offered free admission to an opening weekend showcasing a variety of performers in diverse styles, in keeping with its philosophy that no genre of music should be excluded from a venue intended as a public facility.
The Sage Gateshead is also available as a conference venue, and it hosted the Labour Party's Spring conference in February 2005.
The building
The Sage Gateshead contains three halls, a 1,700-, a 400-seater and a smaller rehearsal and performance Hall - Northern Rock Foundation Hall. The rest of the building was designed around these three halls to allow for maximum attention to detail in their acoustic properties. Though its audience capacity is small by international standards, Hall One was intended as an acoustically perfect space, modelled on the renowned Musikverein in Vienna. Its ceiling panels may be raised and lowered and curtains drawn across the ribbed wooden side walls, changing the sound profile of the room to suit any type of music. Hall Two is an intimate venue, also acoustically excellent and possibly the world's only ten-sided performance space. Even the building's concourse was designed with attention to acoustic properties, allowing it to be used for informal music-making. Below the concourse level is the Music Education Centre, where workshops, courses and day-to-day instrumental teaching takes place.
The building and halls are open to the public even when there are no performances taking place, and there are 5 bars, a café-bar, a brasserie and shop for casual visitors, as well a technologically well-equipped musical branch of Gateshead public library.
Opinion
As a new and highly visible cultural project, there is some depth of popular debate surrounding The Sage Gateshead. There is a broad base of local support for the centre, including cross-party backing from local government. Conversely, some feel that along with the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art it represents an invasion of highbrow culture that is irrelevant and inaccessible (and often incomprehensible) to the bulk of the population, and that money would be better spent in other areas, such as improving Gateshead's residential areas and High Street. However local people from Gateshead and Newcastle feel as if The Sage Gateshead is very much part of their community and often attend classes and performances in the building as well as using it as a local facility.
The building itself has its admirers and detractors. While many people hold it to be a fine example of Norman Foster's later, Pritzker Prize-winning design, others draw comparisons with a large slug; Gavin Stamp, writing as "Piloti" in Private Eye's Nooks and Corners column, suggested that the structure resembles a "shiny condom".
The Sage Gateshead was awarded the Local Authority Building of the Year in the 2005 British Construction Industry Awards and more recently the RIBA Award for Inclusive Design.