This project focused on the questions of "What is a welcoming public performance space? What do the residents of Cardiff and the staff and students of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD) want to see, feel, and experience in such a space? How can we stitch learning institutions, the city and its people, and culture and performance together in a space?" 

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This project began in response to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD) acquiring the lease to the ground floor of the historical Old Library Building in Cardiff Centre and significant funding to upgrade the building as a whole. Maintaining but improving the upper floors which are already in use for staff and students as rehearsal and learning spaces, the upgrading of the Old Library's ground floor space presents a unique opportunity for the institution to explore, celebrate and invest in the everyday experiences and opportunities of the residents of Cardiff and Wales; and the existing cultural infrastructure of the city. The RWCMD hired JK&A to help them explore this.

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Our approach to engaging with the various ‘publics’ that constitute the ‘public’ of the Royal Welsh was exploratory and built on existing relationships largely through workshops. The ‘publics’ we engaged with are loosely categorised into three bodies: the general public, the student body and staff. In total we ran eight workshops which engaged with 23 students, 16 staff members, and 60 members of the public. We also ran an online survey which explored similar questions and collected responses from 60 people.

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Our workshops were guided by a series of questions. Initially, we explored the role of the college within the city: “What is the culture of the school within the city? Who do you connect with? What other institutions, places and organisations sustain the Royal Welsh? What is a cultural space to you?”

 

Then we explored the potential of a new Old Library building: “How can the new building better serve your needs in light of the cultural ecosystem of the Royal Welsh and Cardiff? And the cultural ecosystem you want the school to have?”

 

Our method of working aimed to provide a balanced synthesis between spatial and social thinking, encouraging participants to think through the space but this not to be so prescriptive that aspirational, inventive, and novel ideas and hopes would be curtailed.

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We worked in four main ways throughout the engagement project:

1. We created approximate bubble maps – or mind maps that map loosely onto the floorplan of the building– asking the various publics what they would like to see, change, keep, preserve or imagine;

2. Participants were asked to map cultural spaces throughout the city (formal and informal), and used formal maps of the building to understand the limitations and possibilites of the site;

3. The various publics were asked to complete a survey which gathered demographic info as well as opinions on the building, and the arts. 60 people answered and this provided quantitative evidence, context, and ensured more ideas were represented than on the maps

4. We created a voting system based on proposals that had been collected from previous sessions for engagement groups of young people to comment on and evaluate.

 

Across all the feedback four themes emerged as critical, encompassing the building as: an activated space; a series of adaptive or modal performance spaces; a place for public offerings; and a place to build connections.