The Red Room
Rather than hiring traditional cruise ship designers for its new line of ships, Virgin decided to hire architects and designers who had never designed for sea before, assembling a “dream team” of international firms and creating innovative ship interiors focused on design.
Our project is the Red Room – the world’s first flexible, multi-form and multi-purpose theater on a cruise ship. The theater can transform from a 450-seat proscenium theater to a 550-seat alley configuration, to a flat floor – and mosh pit – for up to 800 people. The performance space uses retractable Jezet seating which had to be carefully designed and detailed to be able to work with the movement of the ship, even under rough sea conditions.
Designed for maximum flexibility and to support the widest range of performances, the 12m wide by 21m deep “wedge” of seating is conceived of a pixelated sea of colored seats in red-purple hues that is able to disappear entirely as it retracts transforming into a wall of drawers which only reveals the subtle red lines of the now folded risers and revealing a glittery poured resin floor, whose graphics register the sense of movement in the space, able to intensify reflection and color from the exposed lighting grid above.
Lighting was also carefully considered to transform with the physical transformation on the space: from the modulation of hidden linear lighting which creates organic layering and three dimensional relief across the undulations of the perimeter walls to the capacity to completely change the immersive lighting intensity and color of the theatrical grid, each performance setting and experience – from flat floor to alley to proscenium – is intimately tied to a lighting setting which supports it and intensifies the sense of immersion in the space.
