Theatres of Architectural Imagination

Prelude

Significant Actions: On theatre and architecture

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

1. Introduction

Lisa Landrum and Sam Ridgway

Bodies

2. The Dramatization of Architecture: Bodies in the Drawings of Álvaro Siza

João Miguel Couto Duarte

3. Die Turnstunde: Hans Hollein’s Museum Performing Itself

Eva Branscome

4. Theatrical Metaphors in Bruno Schulz’s Prose: aA Play of Imagination for Potential Architecture

Anca Matyiku

5. Lecoq's Mimodynamics for Architects: Practicing a Renewal of Architectural Imagination

Laura Gioeni

6. Projecting the Eccentric Theatre: Representations of the Synesthetic Experience at the Bauhaus

Jodi La Coe

7. Performing the Common: Political Imagination of Protest in Place

Paul Holmquist

Entr’acte A

Constructing Table – A Polyphonic Drawing Experiment Between Anamorphic Disguise and Dissection

Bahar Avanoğlu and DrawingConstructions

Settings

8. Roman Theatre’s Scaenae Frons as a Thematic Edifice

Dagmar Motycka Weston

9. A Question of Décor: Political Theatre in Renaissance Ferrara

Indra Kagis McEwen

10. Public Spaces as Theatres of Action: Lawrence Halprin’s Phenomenological Perspective on Cities

Gaia Piccarolo

11. "The Play’s the Thing": On Theatricality and Modern Public Space

Alexandra Stara

12. Imagining a Participatory Theatre in Ahmedabad

Daniel Williamson

13. Relations among Things: Aldo Rossi and Seville’s Semana Santa

Lily Chi

Entr’acte B

A Good Host

Roger Watts

Black Box of Imagination: Deconstructing the Notion of Theatres of Imagination

Marianne McKenna

(Inter)Actions

14. A Tale of Two Foyers: On Space between Thresholds

Adam Sharr

15. The Palace and the Plaza: A Postwar Convergence

Marcela Aragüez

16. A Delegated Performance for Public Space: The Mile Long Opera

Alessandra Mariani

17. Monsters of Architecture and the Magical Function of Theatre: A Look at Balinese Temples

Tracey Eve Winton

18. An Encounter with Wholeness: Vis and Ramin at Persepolis

Negin Djavaherian

Entr’Acte C

Drumming in the Hall of the Mountain

Stefan Jovanović

19. Earthly Theatres: Moving gGounds, Suffusing Airs, Sentient Surrounds

Frédérique Aït-Touati and Andrew Todd in conversation with and introduced by Lisa Landrum

20. Janus/In Time: Universal Openings via Live Arts: Theatre, Dance and Architecture

Jacqueline Loewen and End of the West Collective, Avinash Muralidharan Pillai Saralakumari, David Thomas, and Scott Henderson in conversation with and introduced by Lisa Landrum

Biography

Lisa Landrum is Associate Professor and Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton University, and a post-professional Master’s and PhD in Architectural History and Theory from McGill University. She is a registered architect in New York State and Manitoba, and a fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Her research on architectural agency and the theatrical origins of architectural acts is published in several books, including Reading Architecture (Routledge 2019), Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (Routledge 2017), Architecture’s Appeal (Routledge 2015), Architecture as a Performing Art (Routledge 2013), and Architecture and Justice (Routledge 2013).

Sam Ridgway is an architect and Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has a Master of Architecture from the University of Adelaide and a PhD from the University of Sydney. His research and publications have focused on a theorization of factory-made buildings, construction theory, architectural representation, and the texts and buildings of the remarkable architect and academic Marco Frascari. Recent work explores architectural imagination by enquiring into the complex relationship between architecture and theatre. His publications include Architectural Projects of Marco Frascari: The Pleasure of a Demonstration (Routledge 2015), and "A Theater of Architectural Monsters," in Ceilings and Dreams: The Architecture of Levity (Routledge 2020).

'Readers in architecture, theater, anthropology, philosophy, and other fields will discover here not only the interdependencies of these disciplines, but their roles in the configurations of imaginings that endow human life with its most eloquent communications. Face-to-face, hand-to-hand, at rest or while moving, dramatic actions performed spontaneously or seasonally, in houses or on streets, are shown to situate and orient us in the world, as we alternately succeed and struggle with interpersonal and environmental justice.' David Leatherbarrow, Emeritus Professor, University of Pennsylvania, USA 

'This collection establishes embodied architecture as an essential theatrical, imaginative and compassionate practice.　The sacred, the magical and the political appear with surprising architectural relevance and dramatic force. The scholarship is impeccable; the stories engaging and inspiring.' Marcía Feuerstein, Associate Professor at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture, Washington Alexandria Architecture Center, USA and co-editor of Architecture as a Performing Art, among other publications

'From the performativity of public spaces to theaters of the world reinterpreted as eco-ethical dramas, this highly original book puts into play new notions of memory theater for contemporary architectural discourse. Critical examples from antiquity to post-colonial contexts provide timely reflections that will enliven readers’ architectural imagination.' Federica Goffi, Professor of Architecture, Carleton University, Canada and editor of Marco Frascari’s Dream House: A Theory of Imagination, among other publications