International Shakespeare Globe Centre
Shakespeare’s Globe
American actor/director Sam Wanamaker started the campaign to build a Globe Theatre reconstruction in the late 1960’s and was joined by architect and Pentagram partner Theo Crosby in the mid 1970’s. Wanamaker’s plans grew to fully occupy a one acre site on the banks of the Thames, opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. As well as the Globe reconstruction, the site was to accommodate a second, indoor theatre, restaurants, cafes, a library, shop exhibition hall, education department and full back-stage facilities. Greenfield was taken on at Pentagram by Crosby in 1986 as Project Architect. After Crosby’s death in 1994 Greenfield let the project through the significant final design and construction stages to its completion three years later.
Funds had dried up in the late 1980’s, after extensive groundworks had been completed. Crosby set up an innovative programme of ‘self-build’, in which four tradesmen slowly built large portions of the concrete frame in small financial packages aligned with the slimmed-down fundraising achievements.
By the early 1990s fundraising momentum gained pace culminating in a substantial National Lottery grant in the first wave of donations. At that point the Management Contract with Lovell Construction was resurrected and the Centre was opened by the Queen in 1997.
Architects: Pentagram Design Ltd
Structural and Building Services Engineers: Buro Happold
Quantity Surveyor: Boyden and Co
Management Contractor: Lovell Construction Ltd.
