Theatre Design & Technology - Oct 1967 - 14

tions and gave the city his results. Now let me discuss
briefly a few other helpful developments. First, a very wonderful thing happened. A group of architects got together
and contributed about 5,000 hours, free hours, to prepare a
study of the downtown area. It included (and even located)
a civic center; in short, it basically said what was needed.
They built a model; the model was on display and everybody
saw it. And so, people began to talk and build the interest.
Secondly, about two years ago in the last weeks of the legislative session, a group of us went to the Legislature and
got them to pass an act which created a separate authority
and levied taxes to support it. Although it's debatable, I
believe that the separate authority is a very wise approach
for several reasons. One is that, while it's never possible
to eliminate politics when using tax money, it does create
some sort of an independent vehicle comprised of Board
people who will ask the right questions rather than be dedicated to the Chamber-of-Commerce size-concept. Such a
Board's also insulated from the staff level, the administrative
level of city hall. Everything doesn't have to be cleared, so
you can get things done in a hurry when speed is important.
In brief summary, this is what we plan to do. We are going
to build a single civic center. It will include a 3,000 seat
concert hall, a 1,100 seat theatre, an exhibition hall of
100,000 square feet, plus the usual allied facilities of a
restaurant, catering facilities, etc. We think that it will be
completed by 1971, the Centennial year of Birmingham.
DeGAETANI: Our next speaker is Mr. Jonathan King, Secretaryof the Ford Foundation's Educational Facilities Laboratory.
He will speak to us about performing arts facilities in the
national secondary school program.
.
KING: When it was first suggested that I come here to talk
about secondary school facilities for the performing arts, it
seemed to me the situation was so bad that maybe a moment of silence would be more in order. The current cultural kick which is now in full flower in the colleges and
communities across the United States will, with a normal
cultural lag, no doubt fil ter down into the secondary schools
in the next decade.
In a sense, the schools represent the proletariat masses of
the theatre business. Roughly, 80 to 90 percent of all students now have access to something called a theatre or
auditorium; but they're bad theatres, they're bad auditoriums,
they're bad concert halls, they're bad study halls, they're
bad lecture rooms. The reason they're so bad is that they
were built to fit all needs of all people in the community
without any realistic effort to compromise. Many of the older
high schools in the United States have these gigantic cavities in them that haven't been filled since the last time
William Jennings Bryan went through town running for office; no one except him has ever been heard in the back
row. We got an idea for a project at EFL a year or so ago
which we referred to as the "cannibal project." We put together a team of architects, theatre consultants, and acoustic consultants and got six auditorium nominees from school
boards. Surprisingly enough, out of the available space, y011
could often build quite a decent small theatre and still have
enough left over for a couple of lecture halls and some seminar rooms, the kinds of spaces the school hadn't been able
to find earlier. I think the fixed perimeters keep us from wild
notions, like having a theatre that is the biggest in town, or
the most flexible one ever, or one that'll suit every need
since the beginning of time, all in a single hall. In any
event, our study establ ished that you could quite economically take some of these old, bad auditoriums and produce
rather useful educational and theatrical space out of them.

We've also been involved in encouraging the design of
some divisible auditoriums. We caught hell from the theatre
people for the first one. Ours wasn't the first one ever
done; I went to an elementary school built around 1850
which had a divisible auditorium. But ours was the first that
had any acoustical integrity; nonetheless, it was a very bad
theatre. But, afterwards, I got the program out for that auditorium, which explained that it was to be used for school
dances, PTA meetings, a motion picture theatre, and so
on. Some seventeen specific kinds of programs were to run
there without any indication of which of these programs the
school district took more seriously than others.
In conclusion, three problems need to be dealt with in designing theatres at the school level. The first is a question
of priorities. If you have only 86 square feet per student in
a secondary school, as they do in California as against our
opulent 140, it's difficult to carve much theatrical space out
of that ratio unless the business of theatre is important to
the schools. Schools are responsive to needs, and after
Sputnik, everyone throughout the United States knew that
you couldn't fight the Russians without language and physics
laboratories. It may be that if somehow we could tie theatre
into the Cold War, we could get the theatres.
The second big problem is programming. In a new school,
theatre personnel doesn't exist before the school and its
theatre is built. This is true of some of the civic centers,
but it's generally not true, for example, at the college level.
Here you have a theatre group with whom the architect and
the outside consultants can work. But secondary schools are
usually made up from scratch. The architect goes away, the
consultant goes away, and the people who move in find
themselves with this object that has been carved out of the
middle of the school. If it doesn't go very well with the
people who use it, this isn't entirely surprising.
Third, I think we must make more intelligent design decisions in connection with school auditoriums and school theatres. They will always have to be multi-purpose spaces, but
they can be more successful multi-purpose spaces if we'll
face up to those purposes of the school which are the most
significant. We must stop compromising in design on all issues. Very often the school, for example, has a small flyloft, but nobody ever flies sets. They often have inadequate
dressing rooms; they almost never have adequate rehearsal
space; they almost never have adequate space for the storage of sets and props. Now if instead of building a kind of
imitation Broadway theatre, we would take that wasted space
and put it into teaching space and the storage spaces necessary for teaching, we would have far better school theatres.
DeGAETANI: Our next speaker is one of USITT's own, Mr.
William Adolphus Briggs, member of the American Institute
of Architects, member of the AlA's Committee on Theatre
and Auditorium Architecture. Mr. Briggs has developed the
very fine national reputation for undertaking feasibility and
program studies for civic cultural centers. It is very appropriate that the formal presentations end with Bill who is an
architect. This will tend to bridge the theoretical gap between this group of owners and clients and the architects
and directors you will hear and see this afternoon.
BRIGGS: This panel is devoted to two subjects: "Who" is
building theatres and "Why7" The obvious, direct, and rather
facetious answer to the "who" is that contractors are building theatres. The only reason "why" the contractor builds
anything is to make money. Before dismissing this as a
platitude, let's consider why we have this stellar gathering of
US ITT members here today. Well, we enjoy an opportunity
to exchange thoughts, to blab about favorite subjects, but

[MillO THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

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