The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Adrian Forty
11.2 | Royal Festival Hall, foyer. Contemporary photograph.
ultimate goal. You can simply be in it. Indeed, I am tempted to say that the
building’s purpose, as a concert hall, is almost irrelevant to the qualities of
the foyer; one could imagine it as part of some other sort of building—a library,
say—and its effect would remain the same.
Considered as a foyer, it stands comparison with those of the great
opera houses of nineteenth-century Europe—the Paris Opéra, the Dresden
Zwinger—whose vast foyers dwarfed the auditoria themselves, and whose
remarkable staircases allowed the bourgeoisie to see each other and be seen
in public. There is a difference, though, for in the great nineteenth-century
opera houses there was privilege, and those who carried the greatest prestige
were immediately distinguishable from those with less by virtue of the entries,
lobbies, and spaces that their wealth commanded; but in the Festival
Hall, as originally built (it was altered in the early 1960s), everyone entered
by the same door, took the same flight of steps to the central space of the
foyer, and was entitled to circulate wheresoever they wished within. Although
Gordon Cullen’s drawing of the interior, produced before the building’s
opening, shows it populated by fur-coated and dinner-jacketed British
upper-class types who may look to us like an elite, the building itself neither
encouraged nor permitted social exclusivity, as its more recent history
confirms. And within the auditorium itself, every seat was calculated to be
acoustically on a par and to have an equally good a view of the stage. (In a
rare lapse of its otherwise egalitarian principles, it was provided with boxes;