Tag: theatre

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Peter Wilson

Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More

Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price

Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price

Ana Bonet Miró

In this text, Ana Bonet Miró reflects on the memos written by Joan Littlewood addressed to her company of actors, and to Cedric Price during their collaboration on the Fun Palace project. For more on Littlewood and Price’s collaboration, listen to Ana Bonet Miró and Matthew Blunderfield in conversation for… Read More

Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House

Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House

Janet Parks

A recent acquisition of six drawings by the American architect Benjamin Wistar Morris reveals his long involvement with one of the most important urban projects of the twentieth century. Morris’s role in this project was a highlight of his career although he has not been widely associated with it. A… Read More

Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre

Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre

Hana Nihill

‘Artists such as Poelzig, prevented from building in real life, have been driven to create Expressionist cinema architecture […] But in the long run, pasteboard fantasy creations […] can never be satisfying fodder for the architect; he has an inner urge to conceive and erect buildings in which real people… Read More

Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS

Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS

Helen Thomas

Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More

Hans Poelzig: Der Golem

Hans Poelzig: Der Golem

Robert Wightman

I gaze at the screen, engrossed in the German horror film Der Golem (originally released in 1915 and reworked for reissue in 1920), a masterpiece of performance art. This cinematographic journey is my latest odyssey into the work of Hans Poelzig. The film catalogues his lesser-known work in the art… Read More

Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space

Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space

Thomas Hutton

Pliny the Elder recounted the following story in Naturalis Historia: The two great painters of classical Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius staged a contest to determine the greater painter. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting, the grapes he depicted appeared so real that a bird flew down to peck at them. When… Read More

Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing

Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing

Chloe Spiby Loh

‘With the instinct of a water-diviner, he begins to search, and that which is inside… begins to simmer to the surface.’ – Giorgio De Chirico This is a short meditation on an enigmatic drawing by Aldo Rossi. The drawing is framed as a stacked layering of three architectural elements whose… Read More

Writing Prize 2020: The Anatomy of an Oyster Theatre

Writing Prize 2020: The Anatomy of an Oyster Theatre

Emilie Banville

In the beginning, there was only a shell. An empty shell. But we could already sense the contours of its elliptical shape, its multilayered protective envelope, stratified, laminated, like the bark of a tree (a). Slowly, the outer flaps of the carapace would move away from each other, vertically sweeping… Read More

Outside In

Outside In

Emily Priest

Music plays from behind a curtain. Lights come on and you see that the curtain runs along two sides of a carpet whose centre hosts a leopard skin cushion. There is a chair at one side of the carpet and at the opposite end, a single column. Not before long… Read More

Tom de Paor: On Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Theater der Massen, Berlin, 1919

Tom de Paor: On Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Theater der Massen, Berlin, 1919

Tom de Paor

The drawing is thinking, the same mark used over and over, up and down, hurdling scales quickly, the pulled edge of the sheet mimics the line. There is one idea – on the right, closer up – a  study after or rehearsal for the three-quarter view bleached out from the… Read More

Dance Dance Revolution

Dance Dance Revolution

Iris Moon

In 1788, the art theorist and critic Quatremère de Quincy devoted a long entry of the Encyclopédie méthodique to the arabesque, ‘forms of ornament that are often the most capricious, fantastical, and imaginary, whether in sculpture or painting, that architecture employs in the decoration of walls, panels, door-frames, pilasters, friezes, and sometimes even… Read More