Studio 5 for Tyne Tees Television

Studio 5 and its associated car park were the first new buildings in the Tyne Tees complex, located on a steeply sloping site with a public house, the Egypt Cottage, set between them and the existing buildings.

The location of the pub and its associated rights of light, determined the position of the studio set back from the street, and thereby gave an opportunity for a canopied entrance, covered by a glazed barrel vault. At the end of the arcade, a break between it and the entrance doors heralded a symbolic, stylised version of the Minoan horns used earlier by the architects on Norgas House. These rectilinear concrete forms were a skeletal reversed version of the earlier model, symbolic of an over-sized tuning fork, which was perhaps appropriate considering Tyne Tees’s role in the vanguard of popular music broadcasting in the early 1980s with The Tube – named after the entrance walkway.

The actual entrance was formed from a glass cube, another favourite device of Ryder and Yates, with white columns offering support. A contemporary building to Studio 5 was Terry Farrell’s complex for TVAM in London. Both buildings were in run-down areas and owed little to their surroundings, but while one was an exercise in fashionable post-modernism, the other remained coolly modern.