This volume explores connections between architecture and theatre, and encourages imagination in the design of buildings and social spaces.
Imagination is arguably the architect’s most crucial capacity, underpinning memory, invention, and compassion. No simple power of the mind, architectural imagination is deeply embodied, social, and situational. Its performative potential and holistic scope may be best understood through the model of theatre. Theatres of Architectural Imagination examines the fertile relationship between theatre and architecture with essays, interviews and entr’actes arranged in three sections: Bodies, Settings, and (Inter)Actions. Contributions explore a global spectrum of examples and contexts, from ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy to modern Europe, North America, India, Iran, and Japan. Topics include the central role of the human body in design; the city as a place of political drama, protest, and phenomenal play; and world-making through language, gesture, and myth. Chapters also consider sacred and magical functions of theatre in Balinese and Persian settings; eccentric experiments at the Bauhaus and 1970 Osaka World Expo; and ecological action and collective healing amid contemporary climate chaos. Inspired by architect and educator Marco Frascari, the book performs as a Janus-like memory theatre, recalling and projecting the architect’s perennial task of reimagining a more meaningful world.
This collection will delight and provoke thinkers and makers in theatrical arts and built environment disciplines, especially architecture, landscape, and urban design.
Author(s): Lisa Landrum, Sam Ridgway
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 328
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Prelude: Significant Actions: On Theatre and Architecture
1 Introduction
Bodies
2 The Dramatization of Architecture: Bodies in the Drawings of Álvaro Siza
3 Die Turnstunde: Hans Hollein’s Museum Performing Itself
4 Theatrical Metaphors in Bruno Schulz’s Prose: A Play of Imagination for Potential Architecture
5 Lecoq’s Mimodynamics for Architects: Practicing a Renewal of Architectural Imagination
6 Projecting the Eccentric Theatre: Representations of Synesthetic Experience at the Bauhaus
7 Performing the Common: Political Imagination of Protest in Place
Entr’acte A: Constructing Table – A Polyphonic Drawing Experiment Between Anamorphic Disguise and Dissection
Settings
8 Roman Theatre’s Scaenae Frons as a Thematic Edifice
9 A Question of Décor: Political Theatre in Renaissance Ferrara
10 Public Spaces as Theatres of Action: Lawrence Halprin’s Phenomenological Perspective on Cities
11 “The Play’s the Thing”: On Theatricality and Modern Public Space
12 Imagining a Participatory Theatre in Ahmedabad
13 Relations among Things: Aldo Rossi and Seville’s Semana Santa
Entr’acte B: A Good Host
Black Box of Imagination: Deconstructing the Notion of Theatres of Imagination
(Inter) Actions
14 A Tale of Two Foyers: On Space between Thresholds
15 The Palace and the Plaza: A Postwar Convergence
16 A Delegated Performance for Public Space: The Mile-Long Opera
17 Monsters of Architecture and the Magical Function of Theatre: A Look at Balinese Temples
18 An Encounter with Wholeness: Vis and Ramin at Persepolis
Entr’acte C: Drumming in the Hall of the Mountain
19 Earthly Theatres: Plurality and Precarity in a Changed theatrum mundi
20 Janus/In Time: Universal Openings via Live Arts: Theatre, Dance, and Architecture
Index
