The Making of… the OVO Hydro

The Making of… is an opportunity to reflect on Foster + Partners’ completed projects and the process of making them.

This month, the OVO Hydro (previously the SSE Hydro) celebrates its 10-year anniversary. The 12,500-capacity arena is located alongside the practice’s SEC Armadillo, on the northern edge of the River Clyde and within the redevelopment of Glasgow’s former docks.

Ben Scott, Senior Partner and Architect, and David Gillespie, Associate Partner, Architect and Design Systems Analyst, describe the process of making the building.

The ambitious brief from the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) was to design the UK's first major purpose-built, indoor music venue. When the project began in 2005, certainly in terms of scale, the only comparable examples in the UK were buildings that had originally been built for a different purpose and had subsequently been converted into music venues. Typically, these had a rectangular floor plan and linear rows of seats, often at an acute angle to the stage. The OVO Hydro broke the mould and redefined the live music experience. Inspired by Greek and Roman amphitheatres, its curved form was generated from the inside-out, by optimising lines of sight to the stage.

In order to develop the complex geometry that derived from the radial seating, parametric 3D modelling and in-house view analysis tools were used to visualise views from every seat. This allowed the quality of the view to be quantified, through every stage of the design process.

Early forms of 3D printing technologies were used to build physical models of the Hydro, to help review design options, and a full parametric design model and geometry method statement was developed as the project progressed. These 3D tools were an essential means of communicating the design to the contractors, during the construction process. This was a full-service project, meaning we covered every aspect of design and construction, and ultimately produced the construction information for all contractors.

Much like a clock face, the building’s symmetrical form makes wayfinding intuitive. Working closely with the SEC, we created a real-time 3D model to test how people might move through the building, which we then used to inform the signage strategy. The model was built using a games engine - at a time when these technologies were not commonplace - and well before we started using VR (linked with design tools such as Revit) to virtually place ourselves within evolving designs.

Flexibility is an integral part of the building’s design. The free-spanning roof structure creates a highly adaptable column-free space - and an extremely large, flat floorplate - for artists to work with. We also designed a combination of fixed, retractable and removable seating to enable a wide range of different staging layouts.

While working on the project, major artists such as U2 were becoming more experimental with their staging arrangements, which fed into our evolving design. Furthermore, when the Hydro was announced as a venue for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, this presented another set of functional requirements, which had to be incorporated.     

The building’s flexibility extends to the outside, with a façade that is clad in translucent ETFE panels. Lighting can be programmed to display different colours - and images are also projected onto the screen. This in-built capability allows the building to act as a city-wide announcement for touring artists and become a beacon for the development at night. 

When it opened, the Hydro quickly became one of the busiest music venues in the world. Over the past ten years, the building’s inherent flexibility has allowed it to be a vessel for a wide range of global events, such as COP26, the MTV Music Awards and pro wrestling shows.  

It has been wonderful to witness the building’s impact on the millions of people who have visited - underlining Glasgow’s presence as a global city.

View the 360 tour of OVO Hydro.