Floating Theatre
The First Prize winning entry of the OISTAT Theatre Architecture Competition 2015. This ideas competition asked designers to conceive a floating theatre on the river Spree, at a location known as Holzmarkt. Like much of east Berlin, this area has supported a thriving independent culture for many years, although this too now faces commercial development pressure. The theatre is designed for performance of Judith Thompson’s The Crackwalker, a play with four principal actors, typically staged for small audiences, which focuses on people living on the margins of society. While climaxing in an event of unmitigated, tragic suffering, the play also reveals the innermost dreams, loves and affection of its subjects.
| Location: | Berlin, Germany |
|---|---|
| Status: | Competition, Winning Entry |
| Date: | 2015 |
The First Prize winning entry of the OISTAT Theatre Architecture Competition 2015. This ideas competition asked designers to conceive a floating theatre on the river Spree, at a location known as Holzmarkt. Like much of east Berlin, this area has supported a thriving independent culture for many years, although this too now faces commercial development pressure. The theatre is designed for performance of Judith Thompson’s The Crackwalker, a play with four principal actors, typically staged for small audiences, which focuses on people living on the margins of society. While climaxing in an event of unmitigated, tragic suffering, the play also reveals the innermost dreams, loves and affection of its subjects.
The theatre strives to abolish the spectators’ privileged position over the performer, avoiding easy, merely voyeuristic, sympathy that often accompanies works depicting the lives of the disadvantaged. A four-sided arena layout, reflecting the symmetry of the four protagonists, creates an intensely intimate experience. The stage is not separated and the performance can take place around the audience. Scenes which are not meant to be visible (on playwright’s explicit instruction) can be hidden from sight, yet take place in close proximity. Evening performances will have the feeling of a gathering around a campfire.
The location of the theatre on the water creates a sense of isolation and sacredness, but also of openness, and implicitly addresses all of Berlin into the performance. Simple, highly formal design using raw, low cost materials works in the spirit of Holzmarkt’s character, without fetishizing it, or producing architecture of spectacle.
Takeshita Concert Hall
The Takeshita House of Music is located between a centre of youth pop culture on Takeshita-Dori, the high-street shopping of Meiji-Dori (connecting Takeshita to Omotesando), and the traditional landscape of the Togo Shrine. This context presents an opportunity to create a place of exchange between these different worlds, attracting a wider range of audiences and performers, fluidly accommodating the contrasting identities of adjacent neighborhoods.
| Location: | Tokyo, Japan |
|---|---|
| Status: | Competition Entry |
| Date: | 2015 |
The Takeshita House of Music is located between a centre of youth pop culture on Takeshita-Dori, the high-street shopping of Meiji-Dori (connecting Takeshita to Omotesando), and the traditional landscape of the Togo Shrine. This context presents an opportunity to create a place of exchange between these different worlds, attracting a wider range of audiences and performers, fluidly accommodating the contrasting identities of adjacent neighborhoods.
Our proposal is an attempt to remove from the music hall any sense of exclusivity, monumentality, or association with an unapproachable ‘high’ culture. Instead, the concert hall must be accessible and open. To this end, the theatre volume is wrapped in a lightweight, open structure, which allows public spaces such as the restaurant and bar to support the life on the street as well as serving the guests seeing a performance. This type of structure is a contemporary adaptation of traditional Japanese framing typologies, which allow spaces to be selectively indoor or outdoor.
A narrow, one storey pavilion extends the commercial frontage on the north side of TakeshitaDori, and creates a permeable transition into a public square that links Meiji-Dori Street to the Togo Shrine garden path, and to the entrance foyer of the theatre.
The concert hall itself is the classic shoebox shapeof dimensions similar to Boston Symphony Hall (still considered one of the acoustically greatest halls in the world) with three tiers of wraparound balconies. The end wall behind the stage is acoustic glazing, corrugated to diffuse sound, allowing natural light into the hall while presenting the image of the city as a backdrop to the performance. Towards the entrance, the concert hall lobbies on each floor face onto the Togo Shrine park. In addition, the ground level side walls of the theatre are designed to pivot open, creating for certain events a new public relationship between the concert hall and its surroundings. These pivoting panels not only allow for a seamless transition between the plaza and the concert hall, they also help welcome a greater variety of musical genres within the concert hall by creating an open condition which is more acoustically suitable for amplified music.