Architecture as a Performing Art

Marcia Feuerstein, Gray Read, Marcia Feuerstein, Gray Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317179191
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

How do buildings act with people and among people in the performances of life? This collection of essays reveals a deep alliance between architecture and the performing arts, uncovering its roots in ancient stories, and tracing a continuous tradition of thought that emerges in contemporary practice. With fresh insight, the authors ask how buildings perform with people as partners, rather than how they look as formal compositions. They focus on actions: the door that offers the possibility of making a dramatic entrance, the window that frames a scene, and the city street that is transformed in carnival. The essays also consider the design process as a performance improvised among many players and offer examples of recent practice that integrates theater and dance. This collection advances architectural theory, history, and criticism by proposing the lens of performance as a way to engage the multiple roles that buildings can play, without reducing them to functional categories. By casting architecture as spatial action rather than as static form, these essays open a promising avenue for future investigation. For architects, the essays propose integrating performance into design through playful explorations that can reveal intense relationships between people and place, and among people in place. Such practices develop an architectural imagination that intuitively asks, 'How might people play out their stories in this place?' and 'How might this place spark new stories?' Questions such as these reside in the heart of all of the essays presented here. Together, they open a position in the intersection between everyday life and staged performance to rethink the role of architectural design.

PART I
Designing Performance

1

Architecture as a Performing Art: Two Analogical Reflections

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Architectural design is usually identified with the production of novel and striking visual images that, nevertheless, seldom result in a built environment capable of revealing a true sense of the inhabitants’ place in the world. The result is usually shock and short-lived amazement: one more tourist attraction, an identifiable brand for an institution, or a fashionable destination. Given this prevalent situation, the consideration of potential alternatives towards the creation of more meaningful environments is compelling.

The experience of architecture is never merely spatial, and yet what passes today for architectural design is often no more than a manipulation of geometric spatial concepts. Indeed, our lived world is rich in sensations and emotions that arise from our bodily actions and engagement in the world. Perception is never a purely passive reception: it is action, and the motility of our embodied consciousness implies time.1 Our lives are in this sense fundamentally deployed in a temporality that accompanies our pre-reflective bodily motions and intended actions, and which is also a lived spatiality. This interweaving of lived time and space, together with its bearing on significant experience and the construction of meanings, tends to be ignored by conceptual and objectifying design practices. I will endeavor to unearth alternative possibilities by following the analogy between architecture and the performing arts that happens to be present in the depths of our Western architectural traditions. Since performance is by definition a temporal event, whose meanings are therefore impossible to paraphrase beyond their experience, this framework offers a fertile ground to meditate upon architecture. I will offer two lines of argumentation that are not fully autonomous, but will allow me some clarity of exposition.

ORIGINS

The origins of architecture in human cultures are closely related to ritual: as propitiatory and mimetic object-making (as in the case of an altar for sacrifice or a tomb), and as place-making for the deployment of rites, which came to include theatrical performances, particularly in the European traditions. Architecture is fundamentally characterized by its capacity to frame such events, rather than by a particular style, materiality, or design method. Sociologist Roger Grainger defines two fundamental kinds of human action.2 There are human actions performed in the understanding that the agent controls the outcome (i.e. planning). This is the sort of action that becomes more prevalent after the Cartesian ego becomes identified with the autonomous subject in the early nineteenth century, and assumes the role of responsibility for “development” by means of controlling nature and technological domination. This first kind is of course the one we moderns take for granted. Yet there is another sort of action done in the belief that its efficacy is not controlled by humans in any reducible sense, but proceeds from elsewhere, ultimately manifesting the presence of the sacred, or the presence of a meaning that is “already there” before us. This second kind of action is called ritual. While ritual action and the manifestation of the divine through human artifacts were common in traditional cultures, they are arguably less common today, though by no means impossible. As Grainger writes: “the great danger which ritual avoids is the danger of the confusion of man and God.”3 Ultimately life is uncertain, and our self-conscious rational ego controls very little. Yet it is obviously difficult for a modern man to be able to affirm, with the confidence of the medieval Japanese poet Yoshida Kenko (ca. 1233–1350), that “the most precious thing about life is its uncertainty.”4 The possibility of the second sort of action in a secular world, in the form of participatory acts (in dramatic events) and poetic making, is the main argument convincingly articulated by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly in their recent book All Things Shining.5

If one may dream of an architecture capable of revealing to others a meaningful world, one less flat and nihilistic, one must reconsider the origins of architecture as the space of participatory performance. Vitruvius describes his understanding of the origins of architecture in a few insightful paragraphs at the beginning of his second book of De Architectura.6 He understands this “space” as a clearing in the forest that makes possible language and culture, one that will eventually become the political space of the city (the polis, the urbs). His story starts with a spark from heaven, one generated by the wind in a storm: it is a gift whose origin is the divine breath of nature. The spark lights a fire that the first humans manage to maintain and domesticate, giving themselves a “dwelling.” This fire lights up human desire as well, revealing the bitter-sweet space in which we collectively recognize ourselves as humans, capable of thought, yet mortal, capable of love and compassion. In “Book One,” Vitruvius discusses obsessively the importance of the winds for the health of the city and its inhabitants: he has in mind much more than practical issues. The very possibility of the citizen’s spiritual well-being was at stake. Indeed, architecture offered a clearing that was also an epiphany of the sacred—the gift of a place for human situations to be enacted in time—capable of further disclosing through significant action the appearance of a sacred world.

Vitruvius’ position in the early Roman Empire is an echo of Greek cultural accomplishments, which included the transformations of ritual into the dramatic plays of the classical tradition (ca. fifth century BCE) identified by Aristotle as the first poetic art. As Lisa Landrum suggests in her contribution to this book, the term “architect” identified specific dramatic characters that lead others in acts toward the instauration of order.7 The call “to architect” appears in works such as Cyclops by Euripides and Peace by Aristophanes, plays that reveal the cultural roots, connotations, and expectations associated with the person of the architect and his actions, a term that would eventually (a few centuries later) give its name to the Latin discipline of Architectura. This understanding adds a new dimension to the more conventional understanding of the architect as “master craftsman,” which has been taken for granted in most histories of architecture. In these plays, the “architect” appears as a hero and legislator who opens a clearing for political and social order, a public space (both physical and political) as a site for collective orientation, which is not invented or created, but drawn from the pre-existing orders of culture and the cosmos. Several philosophers and cultural historians have argued that the “space” that opens up between the spectators and the actors and is mediated by the chorus, the same space that is expressed by the physical configuration of Ancient Greek and Roman theater buildings, makes possible the appearance of the sacred for the audience. In this space the acts and deeds of the gods, which contribute to the always possible but often uncanny plots of Greek tragedies, offer the possibility of “distant participation” that characterize theōria in philosophy and science.8

Not surprisingly, Vitruvius speaks of the architecture of the theater as a cathartic event, not as a mere “building” or aesthetic object. Emphasizing the importance of a healthy site for the spectators, he writes: “When plays are given, the spectators, with their wives and children, sit through them spellbound, and their bodies, motionless from enjoyment, have their pores open, into which blowing winds find their way.”9 Ruth Padel has explained that, indeed, the classical Greeks acutely felt their vulnerability to external forces and emotions, personifying them as demons and divinities. The Greeks perceived what was inside their bodies as the complex seat of consciousness, made of the same fabric as the physical universe, with parts analogous to the earth and qualities mirroring divinities that were dark and ultimately unfathomable.10 This analogy runs through ancient medicine, anatomical divination, and architectural theory. Thus Vitruvius expresses a belief in similar correspondences as he explains the power of architecture to both reveal a cosmic order and support health and well-being. Forces from the outside of a city or a building were regarded as aggressive and frightening (the source of disease in Hippocratic medicine), therefore Vitruvius considered proper orientation to the winds as crucial for all architecture. In the theater, the vulnerable spectators came to make peace with the world, to find points of coincidence between phrenes (or mind) and madness, to try to understand “the terrible as good.”11

The human voice of the actor, continues Vitruvius, is “a flowing breath of air” that moves “in an endless number of circular rounds, like the innumerable increasing circular waves which appear when a stone is thrown into smooth water.” This requires the architect to perfect the ascending rows of seats in the theater by means of “the canonical theory of the mathematicians and the musicians.”12 In the design of a theater the architect must apply his knowledge of harmony, and here Vitruvius introduces musical modes and intervals, followed by tetrachords. He also recommends placing bronze sounding vessels under the seats (examples of which have never been found), to enhance the building’s harmonic resonance. The plan of the theater should reflect the geometric essence of the sky, starting from a circle and inscribing four equilateral triangles, “as the astrologers do in a figure of the twelve signs of the zodiac, when they are making computations from the musical harmony of the stars.”13 Although Vitruvius is describing a Roman (not a Greek) theater, his account of it as a cosmic place for tragedy is poignant enough. It is here that architecture, in its performance, discloses an order that is both spatial and temporal, both bodily and cosmological, revealing the “sense” of being human.

Drama was experienced as a tight weaving of temporality and spatiality that aligned hu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Play’s the Thing
• Part I Designing Performance
• Part II Performing Design
• Bibliography
• Index