Guthrie Critical Programming | Molly Dalsin

C R I T I C A L P R O G R A M M I N G | GUTHRIE THEATER ATLIERS JEAN NOUVEL MOLLY DALSIN

Theater has been a part of human culture for more than 2,500 years, but in recent decades the popularity of live theater has dwindled.

Cinema, television, and Internet as forms of entertainment and cultural exchange have surpassed live theater in appeal and convenience. Digital media employs special effects, hyper-reality, and perceptual control to produce stimulating performances without the viewer leaving the comfort of their own home. These forms of digital media can be viewed anywhere with Internet access, making them site-less and disconnected from architecture.

Further, there is no need to gather people to partake in digital media. In contrast, theater has the unique opportunity to generate architecture specific to place, and further, to people. The Guthrie Theater by Jean Nouvel asserts that theater must be urban and deeply aware of its site specificity to be a relevant form of art today.

The city is a vibrant organism full of complexities, juxtapositions, meanings, and contradictions. It holds differences in history, tradition, culture, attitudes, and identities that create vibrant cultures and societies. Cities are made up of a diversity of functions, programs, buildings, infrastructure, and systems that becomes

much more than material when people are added, making cities urban. Thus, Jean Nouvel utilizes urban concepts to instill richness and meaning to the Guthrie building in order to make theater relevant.

Traditional theater buildings were situated in urban sites for accessibility, but the Guthrie exploits the characteristics of the location to become urban itself. Formally, the building is somehow alike and belongs to the site through the visual associations of the existing industrial building typology, consisting of historic mills, silos, and water power plants. Infrastructural relationships with the bridges over the Mississippi and with lighted advertisements are also present. These formal relationships are easy to understand, but each of these elements is not purely formal or visual, rather, they are compounded with historical understandings, modern questions, and novel uses. Smokestacks that were once used for manufacturing become lit up marquees of advertising and spectacle. Bridges that were built to convey people and goods across the river become viewing devices that traverse to nowhere and back.

The Guthrie is not a traditional theater because it is a public building. Jean Nouvel’s decision to lift the theaters from ground level allows for an ample sized plaza to be inhabited below.

The plaza is urban rather than natural as it faces the historic mills, alleyways, and newly constructed condos rather than the highly artificial Gold Medal Park. The plaza opens the block to the riverfront, giving greater accessibility. The plaza has unique directionality due to the rounded nature of the Thrust theater above and the larger-than-life sized panels. The panels hide and upset the radial order of the large structural columns required to stabilize the theater above. The panels are sheathed in the blue cladding, mirror cladding, or massive portraits of leaders in the history of theater. These materials are arranged to layer the building, the observer, the city, and the portraits in the mirrored panels. The plaza is ambiguous, allowing for exploration, movement, and understanding to happen in a diverse way.

By lifting the theaters from the ground level, the structure implies that each theater becomes essentially a separate building, leaving the space in between them for appropriation. The space in between becomes something different from the theater spaces, yet integrated in the overall architecture. The bridge and lobby inhabit the space between the Thrust and Proscenium theaters, tying the buildings together, while maintaining autonomy. It becomes a platform for implicit function and interaction rather than explicit function.

A narrow secondary space is formed between the theater wings and the bridge. This lining is well defined structurally, but ill defined perceptually. It is a contradiction between theater or lobby core. It erases the articulation between spaces and becomes an indeterminate space that induces a threshold between theater and bridge. It is the place where the long escalators serve to disconnect visitors from the dayto-day urban environment and re-present them to ideas of urbanity and the historic district in a new way.

The bridge in particular is an unresolved portion of the building. When viewed from the outside or below, it visually relates to the city’s infrastructural bridges, however, the material cladding implies it belongs to the building. While inside of the bridge, familiar views are distorted through angled, mirror frames and colored glass that shift the meaning and understanding of a view as the person moves through space. What was historical and solid suddenly becomes transient and deconstructed. It is familiar, but somehow strange. The smaller, mirror-framed windows are fragmented pieces of the city, calling attention to historic, contemporary, industrial, natural, ugly and beautiful elements of contradictory nature. This leads to the full sized, blue window wall that simply tints the view blue before crossing the threshold between inside and out. The bridge ends by obfuscating the object of the building and focusing on an undistorted, picturesque panoramic of the city along the river. The sequence of movement and viewing along the bridge hybridizes what is distorted and what is straightforward.

The bridge is just one fragment of the difficult whole. These fragments or moments are associated through an interior street that is wrapped from the urban environment, into, and through the building. Fragments are sequenced along the path to progressively connect and disconnect the user to the urban environment compromising an understanding of the whole.

However, each fragment is memorable because of its vitality, thus a person can construct relationships and meaning between the city and the building.

During the evening, the reflectivity of the glass layers people, movement, lights, buildings and history of the theater together, instilling relationships between people, urbanity, and theater.

The inner street becomes a place of memory, conflict, change, and identity allowing for more and different ways of seeing, understanding, and experiencing the city. These perceptual devices heighten the mental awareness of the visitor. By juxtaposing the known model of the theaters with the complexity of the lobby spaces, the theater goer may translate this newly instilled, rich mental state to the theater performance.

The Guthrie includes three types of theater spaces that allow for a wide range of play types, the thrust, the proscenium, and the black box theaters. The thrust and proscenium in particular are very different places than the urban in between spaces and lobby trajectories. Both theaters are detached from the lobby space through thick walls and minimal openings. They are straightforward, ordered, and built for efficiency in views to the stage.

Once inside of the theaters, the ambiguity, diversity, and connections to the site are lost. However, the theaters function very well as spaces designed to watch performances. The thrust theater is a reproduction of Ralph Rapson and Tanya Moisewitsch’s design for the original Guthrie, a familiar space for classic literature. The proscenium theater is a more directed space than the thrust. The space consists of intensely sloped, forwardfacing seats that funnel directly into a rectangular opening that frames the stage for the viewer. This allows the audience to view from the same vantage point. The thrust and proscenium theaters are thus removed from Jean Nouvel’s ideas about the value of urbanity and sitespecificity.

The exception to this is the experimental black box theater or studio space on the top level. This theater is completely flexible in the types of performer-audience relationships it can embody, and further, is allowed to open itself to the lobby spaces, and ultimately the city. These characteristics allow for implicit functioning rather than explicit as the space is not designed for pure efficiency and straightforward direction, but rather, an ambiguity that can stimulate changes.

Nouvel further instills urbanity into the building by juxtaposing program elements. At particular moments, and in specific ways, public spaces and workspaces are exposed to one another. As there are similarities between the theater production system and the city’s infrastructural systems, specific views between public spaces and workspaces allow for the reflection of what it means to be urban. Each of these views is obscured by angle of view, colored glass, or lights, making this connection somewhat distorted. For example, the fourth and fifth floor lobby space is capped with blue glass on each end obscuring and relating the view of the historic and industrial riverfront with the view of the backstage production.

Another example of programmatic juxtapositions is the theater restaurant that is placed directly into the middle of the fifth floor lobby space. This space becomes a sort of urban woonerf, a living street that slows movement and allows for social interaction. Even though the restaurant is placed between the windowless theaters, the design is not meant to separate diners from the vitality and activity of the city, but rather immerse them in urbanity in a new way.

The workspaces on the second and third level take on a different form of urbanness than the lobby spaces or the theaters. They are not connected to the city in terms of what a city looks like, the activities it supports, or the interactions it promotes, but rather how the city functions.

The workspaces and offices are designed as systems of efficiency and support to the theaters, and are the unseen organizations that keep the theaters and the building functioning. They are the infrastructure to the institution of theater. The spaces are separated into artistic, administration, development, production/costumes, and external relations that are connected through a maze of narrow corridors. These paths are not meant for spontaneous interactions or exploration, but rather a practical way to get from one place to the other.

Another form of urbanness is the location of the set shop atop the parking garage on a separate block from the main building. This space is connected to the theater-support system by what Jean Nouvel calls an “industrial bridge�. This space again is not designed for people, but rather the highway for set pieces to travel from construction to performance. The set shop being detached from the core Guthrie structure gives a sense of uncertainty as to whether the separate building belongs to the city or the Guthrie building.

By utilizing the richness in urbanity and the given site for the Guthrie theater, Jean Nouvel shifts the understanding of the traditional theater program to make theater contemporary and a relevant form of art today. Theater has the advantage over new forms of digital media because it is bound to a place. It integrates the city, the community, and the art of theater together to form a vitality that no form of digital media can match. The urban complexity instilled in the building translates experiences, understandings, and meanings of history, culture, and contemporary attitudes to the theater. The layering of meaning, interpretation, and subsequent mental state makes the architecture difficult to resolve, but it is exactly this multiplicity that make the building and the program of theater urban and relevant today. Overall, the Guthrie theater must be urban and deeply aware of its site specificity for theater to be a relevant form of art today.