Chastening conventions beyond the monkeys' cage

How to rebuild the 150-year-old ruins of the satirical Thalia theatre, located a stone's throw from the monkeys' cage in the Lisbon Zoo? Architects Gonçalo Byrne and Barbas Lopes played with its literary materials: wit, irony and satire.

The story that builds up to the new incarnation of the Thalia theatre in Lisbon, designed by Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos and Barbas Lopes Arquitectos and recently shortlisted as one of the London Design Museum's designs of the year 2013, is too good to be true — from every angle.

Start with the site, the Quinta das Laranjeiras: a suburban property that doubled as a cutting-edge pleasure arena by early 19th century standards, were Count Farrobo used to throw parties good enough for the derived word Farrobodo to stand for wild partying in informal Portuguese. The property of the party animal became, in the early 20th century, an animal party, or at least a fiction of it, the Lisbon Zoo. Not less amusing, the remainder of the site was more recently acquired by the Ministry of Education and Technology, the client who commissioned the design of the Thalia theatre.

Take the story of the building itself: a small theatre built opposite to count Farrobo's main palace, and named after the eight muse, Thalia, the muse of comedy. The count, who occasionally managed opera theatre, commissioned in 1842 the renovation of his small amusement salon and theatre, originally built in 1820, to Italian architect Fortunato Lodi. Writings of the time highlighted the elegance and opulence of Thalia's attendants as well as the building's technical prowess; a theatre of progress, illuminated by gas lighting twenty years before the streets of Lisbon.

Top and above: Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos, Barbas Lopes Arquitectos, <em>Thalia Theatre</em>, Lisbon, 2009-2012 — Top and above: Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos, Barbas Lopes Arquitectos, *Thalia Theatre*, Lisbon, 2009-2012

The Latin inscription Hic Mores Hominum Castigantur ("Here man's conduct is chastised"), in the frieze over the entrance to the theatre, clarified the kind of comedy it was meant for: satire. This particular comical genre is based on truth, but depends on irony, wit and sarcasm to expose weaknesses and flaws. Ironically, like other excessive accumulations of pleasure or culture before, so the Thalia theatre went up in flames, ignited by a distracted gesture of a maintenance worker. And there it remained for 150 years, a memento of its motto, laughing ironically about its double ruin: the physical ruin provoked by the fire and the social ruin of its opulent builder.

Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos, Barbas Lopes Arquitectos, <em>Thalia Theatre</em>, Lisbon, 2009-2012 — Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos, Barbas Lopes Arquitectos, *Thalia Theatre*, Lisbon, 2009-2012

How to rebuild the ruins of this satirical theatre, located a stone's throw from the monkeys cage in the Zoo, with a discernable whiff of elephant dung in one side and a busy road with minimal sidewalk in the other? Architects Gonçalo Byrne and Barbas Lopes played with its literary materials: wit, irony and satire. The demand for a symbolic use of materials — the kind of use that would make them literary materials, made from the same substance of dreams and symbols — is clarified by the architects with an invocation of Gottfried Semper's words in the Four Elements of Architecture:

The outside of the box — the pure volume that encases the Thalia — is made with the ultimate literary material: concrete finished with corrosion

In ancient and modern times the store of architectural forms has often been portrayed as mainly conditioned by and arising from the material, yet by regarding construction as the essence of architecture we, while believing to liberate it from false accessories, have thus placed it in fetters. Architecture, like its great teacher, nature, should choose and apply its materials according to the laws conditioned by nature, yet should it not also make the form and character of its creations dependent on the ideas embodied in them, and not on the material?

For Semper, form is a material of representation, even if a representation of its symbolic nature. The dislocation or exaggeration of the "constructive truth" can equally be construed as a form of satire. When the materials play themselves, they "act" in this very serious comedy of architecture.

The first design operation of this play was the restaging of the ruin, with the clearing of an incongruous three-storey building that faced the road. This was no longer a domestic theatre, so the domestic mask was the first to go. The ruin was now an assertive play of pure forms under the light. Peristyle, foyer, audience and stage became again the sequence of theatrical spaces as well as different acts in this play.

The peristyle was restored to its marbled elegance, but fancier, sharper, with the paving stones and the roof tiles replaced with lioz, a prized local limestone. The Latin inscription recovered its place in the frieze, but now with some distance from it, casting a shadow on the satirical admonition. The polished brass of the glazed entrance doors completes this refined overture.

The second act, the foyer, is staged in a neo-classical fashion, with narrow and tall proportions carefully calibrated with a fluted frieze. The frieze is made with Styrofoam props, the widows are slanted in section to match inside and outside, the fluted rails are made of painted polycarbonate, but the ground and side panelling are set in stone. The clear light of artifice provided by the last windows of the building introduces the darkness of the final act, where both audience and the stage are unified in a dramatic way.

Here, the ruined structure was literally embedded, grafted to a new skin. Concrete was used to consolidate what was mechanically its collaborating formwork. The ruin was the negative onto which the new form was cast. This process of casting obliterated all the non structural elements of the former theatre, all its staging. So many literary manipulations of architectural theory are here materially castigated in concrete, bricks, mortar and steel. Every detail of this last act is dramatic, becoming a character in this play. Structural steel is used for non-structural purposes, supporting light and sound. The internal walls were stripped of their finishing and the marks of its destruction. Without their cladding, they now stand naked. All the windows were closed, and natural light staged through a light beam that traces time through a skylight in the edge of the stage. Roof insulation was made with the most literary of recycled prop materials: papier maché, the spray-on version in this case. Heavy texture and lightweight to finish this almost Semperian transformation of the interior into a texture: not exactly a textile, nor exactly a text.

The outside of the box — the pure volume that encases the Thalia — is made with the ultimate literary material: concrete finished with corrosion. The unified texture of the exposed concrete pigmented in earthy tones was not mechanically finished. A chemical corrosive was applied to texture the surface of the exposed concrete, creating instantaneous patina, and thus instantaneous memory: embedded memory. Bronze-tinted mirrors encase the auxiliary spaces. The new urban edge of the theatre mirrors the street, and the passerby, who becomes an inadvertent actor in the play only the audience inside the theatre can see. Joaquim Moreno

Chastening conventions beyond the monkeys' cage

How to rebuild the 150-year-old ruins of the satirical Thalia theatre, located a stone's throw from the monkeys' cage in the Lisbon Zoo? Architects Gonçalo Byrne and Barbas Lopes played with its literary materials: wit, irony and satire.

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