VENUE: FUGA Budapesti Center of Architecture

1052 Budapest, Petőfi Sándor Street 5.

’The theatre’, I concluded forcefully, ’is two places with two entries, one for the audience and one for the actors. There are two worlds. The people in the dark peer into another world. That is illusion. That is why they come.’

The architect was convinced, and he thanked me profusely for giving him my time. Unfortunately, building a theatre takes too long in a rapidly changing world. Ten years later, he had completed his building, and I had come to reject all the notions I had sold him with such force.

Peter Brook’s answer to an architect (from P. Brook: Threads of Time. A Memoir, Methuen, 1998, p. 41)

 

PROGRAMME

March 26, Friday 9.30 – 12.30 SCENITECTURE

 

From Scenography to Architecture

Vladimír Soukenka (Faculty of Architecture of ČVUT in Prague)

The current educational principle of the subject ,,the science of construction“ originates in static typology – a summary of dimensions and dispositional schemes. Countless architects worldwide, who feel that particularly minimalist architecture lacks the dramatic dimension of social rituals presented in it, attempt to react to this situation. In the case of set design and the field of set design, it is clear that it has left the theatre stage and is all around us. The way of perceiving and organizing theatre space today still involves ritual and aesthetics of life in society. We need to return to architectonic teachings and the creation of human stories, like scenarios, and not like naked typological schemes.

 

Scratch Our SoulsIn the honour of Peter Gabriel
Péter Horgas (scenographer)

A designer or an architect has a special responsibility today when he decides and defines the forms of the play, its site and the relationships between the site and the audience. This is where the decision is taken whether the theatre enunciates, informs, accepts or initiates the audience. 

 

Site Specific

Tomáš Žižka (architect, scenographer)

Site-specific projects actually originate in moments when something has died and something is going to be created, but nobody knows what it is going to be. A new progressive way of a cultural reform has been commercialized since 1989 and efforts of site-specific projects no longer have political and social importance because of criminalization and the lack of interest of local governments in alternative culture.

 

Vegetable Growing for Amourteurs,  or the Theatre Blossoming on the Ruins of an Old House

Andrea Szakál (architect)

In downtown Prague I stumbled upon an abandoned, ruinous plot. I contacted the theatre group called Krepsko and we started to build up our own open-air theatre on the plot which was only inhabited before by heaps of building rubble. We made ourselves a magical garden, where everything is possible; the story, the actors, the props, the costumes sprang up from the refertilized soil.

 

 

Friday 14.30 – 17.30 A THEATRE IS BEING BUILT 

 

Location of Theatre Space 

Lenka Bednářová (architect)

The theatre space stops being a skin for an event hidden within, and the building itself becomes a stage which shapes theatrical events. It connects theatre with art, music, architecture, graphic and light design, and creates new values and dimensions. The aim of the lecture is the assessment of changes in the understanding of theatre space in the central European region, following a show of presentations by the participants in the Architectural Section of Prague Quadrennial 2007.

 

Theatre architecture and society

Zsuzsanna Ordasi (art historian, University of Pannonia)

The theatre venue gives space to more than just  the performance. This is also true for the 20th century and our times, as predominantly other societal factors influence the construction of a theatre building. The architect, after having considered the available financial resources, fulfils a commission. In an ideal case he is with consideration to the local architectural tradition, to trends, is well aware of the canon of theatre architecture and the typology of theatre buildings and aptly uses the available technical means. By referring to historical and contemporary examples I will try to demonstrate that the theatre buildings give an exact and complex image of our societies.

 

Visions and Possibilities  Plans of Hungarian Architecture Students for a Theatre Building in a Site in Ljubljana

Péter Klobusovszki (architect, BudapestUniversity of Technology and Economics)

The task – to integrate the empty interior of a block in the centre of Ljubljana into the city – set into motion a number of spatial analogies taken from the world of theatre: the city as a stage, the theatre as a city, while the opening up of the block’s interior accounted as a symbolic gesture, representation and reality, theatre mirroring the world

    

The Beginnings of Continuity

The Winning Plan of the Architecture Competition for the Weöres Sándor Theatre in Szombathely

László Kalmár and Zsolt Zsuffa (ZSK Architects)

The character of the building placed in a complex architectural environment is dominated by a calm shaping of mass, by a facade reflecting the inner functions and by a stone facing, which gradually becomes airier as it ascends. The new theatre does not impose itself over the square, yet its main entrance, the children’s playground, the terrace of the restaurant-cafeteria and the pedestrian traffic from towards the park fill the space with life. The building speaks at least as much about the spaces surrounding it and generated by it, as about the construction itself.

 

Theatres in the Nocturnal Cityscape

László Deme (project director, Lisys Ltd. )

The presentation will give a short survey of the Hungarian theatres with a decorative illumination and analyzes, through a couple of examples, why the realized devices give the results which we can see today. I will also deal with the question of how the exterior lighting of theatres fits into its environment after nightfall and their function in the nocturnal cityscape.     

 

18.00 – Opening of Chamber Exhibitions

March 27, Saturday 9.30

THEATRES IN THE CITY FABRIC

 

Cells of Space

Mihály Vargha (architect, architecture journalist, Építészfórum.hu)

„Itinerant theatre” is in full blossom nowadays, and the boundaries between architecture, theatre, performing arts seem to get more and more blurred. It is theatre which mostly reinforces this, but architecture also makes us realize day by day that our built environment is actually composed of materialized human behaviour patterns. ’Man is likely to a living statue, a creature producing spatial relations’ – or with an even more concise quotation – ’we ourselves are cells of space’.

 

Theatre as City Dominant

Igor Kovacevic (architect, main currator

of the exhibition Beyond Everydayness)

In central European theatre history there are two kinds of theatres: important ones, which are always built as single buildings, and less important ones, which come in all possible variations. Here we do not write importance just as cultural dimension but as well as economical and political. In this sense we would like to focus on the pretext of the current positioning of the theatres in the city fabric.

 

Színváros – TheatreCity

Forgách András (writer, playwright)

Theatre – as once the old Christians did with the dungeons under Rome – sacralized the de-sacralized industrial halls, cemeteries, ruined buildings, shopwindows, deserted playgrounds, military drill-grounds, churches and so on. A rhetorical question: can such theatre performances dismiss the so-called „stone theatres”, the established theatre institutions? Can the bringing into play of such profane spaces become the dominant theatre trend? Can a  theatre form learn, borrow, adapt something from the another, which dwells in  diametrically opposing spaces? 

 

EXPERIENCING SPACE IN THE CITY, THE THEATRE BUILDING AND ON THE STAGE

Roundtable discussion

 

Marek Adamov (SK, Leader of Stanica Zilina-Zariecie) Bartosz Frąckowiak (PL, director),  Meta Hocevar (SI, director, scenographer )  Moderator: Péter Bach, architect

 

 

 

 

 

 

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