Luton has the largest one day carnival in Europe, and is the location for this new centre for the practice, performance and celebration of carnival arts.

Like carnival itself, the new Carnival Centre in downtown Luton is strange, shambolic and magnificent. It consists of two new buildings astride a large courtyard with a continuous enclosing perimeter, part building, part screen. Two large golden gates break the enclosure at either end of the courtyard, a courtyard which is transformed into a street as part of the carnival route.

“It’s a building so vibrant and inventive that it will have even the most grudging Lutonian dancing in the streets.”
Building Magazine

2011 RIBA Prize

Carnival Arts In Use

A bit of background. Each year in late May the Luton Carnival attracts some 100,000 visitors and is Britain’s largest single day carnival. The Arts Council, who are the principal funders of the project, consulted with carnival clubs up and down the country before deciding that Luton would be the best location for this resource centre. Are provincial carnivals edgier than the highly stratified Notting Hill Carnival? Maybe: reports have shown that a younger generation, hip teenagers from Hackney to Preston, would rather go to Luton than Notting Hill.

The brief asked for a building which reflects ‘the spirit of carnival’. To us that meant that we needed to capture some kinetic energy in what has to be a static building. The first design had five tall crane like objects which we called moko jumbies after the stilt-walking devils which dominate West Indian carnival processions. Some booms were to be motorized and some parts wind sensitive: the effects of parallax would ensure that the jumbies would look as if they were moving against one another as you walked around the building. But quite soon we realized that the building was going to have to be very simple and low; movement would be implied through optical effects in the façade.

And yet, while the façade craved attention it didn’t want to be an essay in tricksy bling. Like architects, carnival artists have a deep interest in materials. They work at the edge of possibility, designing kinetic structures the size of houses light enough to be carried all day on someone’s back. They are not a lay audience: they know when a junction is fudged. To win their respect the construction had to be well done and have some serious logic behind its playfulness.

Another aspect of carnival is that making it happen is insanely time consuming and labour intensive; it is an art form which is highly competitive and secretive in the run up to carnival. The event is prepared for the entire twelve months preceding Carnival day, culminating in the frenzy of ‘mas camp’, (short for masquerade camp) for the final two months of making and rehearsals. How the carnival emerges from the ‘mas camp’, disclosing this effort is very important, firstly in a small arena, during the competition or ‘battle of the bands’ and then in all its magnificence onto the streets. This building needed to respond to these subtle levels of disclosure from the elaborate subdividing of the ‘mas camp’, which has resisted all value engineering, to the perimeter facade screen. This screen invites further enclosure with 4m high nets for cable tying fabrics of different opacities, while the 12m wide ‘mas camp’ doors and the 6m wide golden gates at either end of the courtyard almost succeed in turning the building inside out.