Orietta Lanzarini e Alberto Muffato, Electa, Milano 2009 (pp. 270, € 65,00)
In the last 20 years, the construction of new theatres and concert halls has made an impact on the panorama of many cities, assuming the guise of an international phenomenon. Orietta Lanzarini and Alberto Muffato provide readers with a concise essay on worldwide production over the last 50 years, preceded by a brief historical framework and a critical reading of current trends, which redeems the book against the shortcomings of a merely typological review.
The history of the theatre building aims to identify premonitory signs of certain constants in more recent works. The authors believe that the 18th century, when the theatre building regained its identity by taking on monumental significance and urban functions, marked the start of a process to redefine the architectural casing that, with varied results, soon gained autonomy from its internal spaces and has reached the maximum degree of divarication in the 21st century.
Although the insertion of foyers and accessory spaces in the gaps created between the halls and the indifferent external shell sometimes prompted interesting layout solutions, it is also interpreted as the result of a gradual separation between the complex stage machine and the urban facies of the building containing it, increasingly expected to produce amazement in the spectators. Conversely, the halls generally conform to the consolidated tradition of the Viennese shoebox or reproduce innovative configurations of the stage space tried out in the 20th century, but held firm by rigid acoustic and visual requirements.
In this perspective, Jørn Utzon's symbolic and structurally complex roof of the Sydney Opera House (1955-1973) appears both akin to and distant from the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (1988-2003) designed by Frank O. Gehry. The latter example is both emblematic of the programmatic loss of any structural or volumetric consistency between internal spaces and external surface and of the consolidated social ritual that superintends the definition of the main hall. Inspired by Berlin's Philharmonie (1956-1963) and resembling numerous contemporary proposals, it has crystallised the scheme, losing the original experimental force of Hans Scharoun's masterpiece. The search for stage spaces with variable geometry, commenced in the first half of the 20th century by Heinrich Tessenow, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, continued later by Maurizio Sacripanti, Jürgen Sawade and Cedric Price and applied to the refined Nara Centennial Hall (1991-1999) by Arata Isozaki, seems to have dried up in nearly all the works illustrated.
On the other hand, the reflection between city and spectacle often prompts the opening of accessory spaces, and more rarely of halls, onto the urban setting that, in a sort of reversal, is in turn metamorphosed into a theatre backdrop. However, numerous degrees of permeability between the casings and the urban context fall between the seductive and diaphanous foyer of Carlo Mollino's Teatro Regio Torinese (1965-1973) and Rafael Moneo's introverted and opalescent Kursaal in San Sebastián (1989- 1999). The book provides a selected synthesis of these in which it is not hard to recognise the preferences and reservations of the individual authors.
Containing abundant illustrations, but unfortunately lacking a general bibliography, the book benefits from the methodical rigour of the authors' research in the thankless task of providing a balanced presentation of both the lasting characteristics and the innovations and contradictions of one of the most visited architectural types of the 21st century. Stefano Poli