Project Overview

It has been a long time custom that people go to the theaters to both see and to be seen. As I approached the end of my studies, I took on the challenge of designing a theater.

The focus of my design falls primarily into the category of Theaters with a secondary attempt to provide spaces that allow media production for live TV shows and video recording studios. In essence the spaces within the building will not only be experienced first hand but also by means of modern technology.


Performing arts date back centuries, western performing arts start as as early as the Classical period, 6th century BC, ushered in by the poets like Sophocles and lead up today to play writers like Tyler Perry. These events create large gatherings for an audience to experience live entertainment.

Today it is still done, but technology has allowed us to reach the audience without the large gatherings. Both options are coveted. Feel Free to post any comments you may have.



Monday, February 7, 2011

Building Example 8 - Holland Performing Arts

Holland Performing Arts
Architect- A Collaboration between HDR and Polshek Partnership Architects
Location - Omaha, Nebraska
Size - 175,000 square feet
Completion date - 

The first thing you notice about Omaha’s new Holland Center for the Performing Arts is that you can see right through it. Walls of glass along the ground floor lobby help to enliven the Gene Leahy Mall, a flowing civic park across the street developed in part by Lawrence Halprin in the 1970s to renew the city and reconnect it with the river. 





 












Building Example 7 - Broad Stage

Broad Stage
Architect - Renzo Zecchetto Architects 
Location - Santa Monica, California
Size - 32,000 square feet
Completion Date - August 2008

Owned by Santa Monica College but serving both school and community audiences, the theater complex juggles a range of tasks. On one level, it provides remarkably sophisticated theater-arts facilities for a community college. On another, it stands as a symbol of a blossoming cultural scene in Santa Monica (and the “growing Balkanization of the L.A. area” due to traffic congestion, as Christopher Hawthorne noted in the Los Angeles Times on October 11)













Building Example 6 - Royal Playhouse

Royal Playhouse
Architect - Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects
Location - Copenhagen, Denmark
Size - 226,000 square feet
Completion date - February 2008

The playhouse is an abstract composition of the basic elements of theater, recombined in a striking and unexpected way. The massive cube of the fly tower floats above the horizontal glass plane of the rehearsal and dressing room level that in turn appears to levitate miraculously above the tall open foyer.











Building Example 5

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater
Architect - Bing Thom Architects
Location - Washington, D.C.
Size - 200,000 square feet
Completion date - October 2010


It can definitely be said that the 200,000-square-foot Arena Stage, just renovated and expanded by Bing Thom Architects, improves upon what was found. Thom’s swallowing up the lumpy late Modernist theaters in a glass case may have concerned some preservationists, but it helped tie the two together on this triangular site in the southwest part of the city — initially part of an urban renewal area that may be further uplifted by a waterfront redevelopment plan. Yet the overall scheme does deploy some quixotic design gestures that ignore certain notions of scale, proportion, and the use of a consistent architectural vocabulary.