Design, Manufacture, Supply & Installation of Modular Theatre Seating at the Roundhouse

Tender description

The Roundhouse is one of the most exciting multidisciplinary performing arts organisations in London, holding a unique place in the capital's cultural scene. The venue's offering has a strong live music focus but also features a vibrant programme of theatre, dance circus and other performing arts. The Roundhouse is embarking on a capital programme which over the next 18 months will see the development of a range of new educational facilities as well as new modular seating for the main auditorium, which is the subject of this tender exercise. This tender process aims to appoint an appropriate contractor / manufacturer to design & construct a new 1,300 seat modular seating system for the main Roundhouse Auditorium. Lot 1: The Roundhouse is seeking suitably qualified and experienced companies to design, manufacture, supply and install new modular seating for the main auditorium at the Roundhouse Theatre in Camden, London. The auditorium is currently seated two to three times a year, with seating partially or fully installed to achieve the desired layout. Seating is typically arranged in concentric faceted circles, sometimes with additional flat floor seating depending on format. The most used frequently seated formats are a 360-degree full in the round format, a '270' degree thrust format and a '180' degree end on format. Audience seating is arranged over three sections: Front Stalls (referred to al Stalls), Rear Stalls (referred to as Mezzanine) and Circle level. Circle seating is formed of a series of mobile retractable units which replaced the original manual demountable seating system and is excluded from this package of works. Currently the Stalls and Mezzanine Rear Stalls seating is formed by a manual 'kit of parts' system. The system is very time consuming to install and remove and has now reached the end of its useful life. The proposed Stalls and Mezzanine seating system builds on the Circle's mobile retractable seating unit concept to minimise turnaround times and crew numbers. The target turnaround time for deploying and removing the seating is one day (up to two 8-hour shifts) by a minimum number of crew. This will allow the Roundhouse to significantly reduce dark periods in the auditorium and will also enable more frequent deployment of the seating according to programming requirements. All Stalls and Mezzanine seating will be stored on site, partly in the existing container office building and partly in a double stacked purpose built container block in the service yard.