Theatre Design & Technology - Feb 1972 - 30

A Review of the BirminghamJefferson Civic Center National
Architectural Competition.
Birmingham Civic Center Authority, Birmingham, Alabama: 1969.
I must confess that after a quick perusal
of this book, I allowed it to get buried for
several months. Not planning to build a
Civic Center myself in the near future, it
had less than pressing importance. So now
I have pulled it out for a serious and thorough reading. For anyone trying to suppress
a latent edifice complex, this should make
good medicine. The book consists of two
hundred and seventy plates of non-selected
entries, each plate taking up the entire page
(9" x 13"). The plates are reductions from
the entries themselves, which actually
measure 30" x 40". The result is blinding,
partly due to the poor quality of reproduction of some of the drawings, but mostly
due to the resultant miniscule size of all
labeling and drawings. After one has spent
several hours with the book, one is exhausted by the very idea of a Civic Center.
The eight final designs get only slightly
better treatment: opposite the page of plans
is another full page consisting of a photograph of the model built for the second
stage of the competition. Nowhere do we
get any verbal treatment, either from the
competing architects or from the panel of
judges, discussing the merits of individual
designs or the thinking behind them. So, as
a book, its use is definitely limited.
The opening twenty pages are interesting,
consisting of the background for the competition and the stipulations under which
the architects had to work. The ambitious
plans for the center called for a 10,000

Bunraku, The Puppet Theatre
Tsuruo Ando. Introduction by Charles J.
Dunn; translated and adapted by Don
Kenny. Walker/Weatherhill, New York
and Tokyo: 1970.222 pp. $4.95.

Tsuruo Ando, former director of the Japan
Theatrical Association, is the first writer to
properly emphasize for non-Japanese that
the Japanese theatre form called Bunraku
is not primarily a "puppet" theatre but a
"chanter's" theatre in which the puppets
are made to embody the story being
chanted by the principal performer: the
joruri singer.

seat sport "coliseum," a 3,000 seat Music
Hall, a 1,200-1,300 seat Theatre, a large
exhibition hall-( 100,000 square feet minimum)-plus such other related facilities as
central offices and a plush restaurant with
parking for all these facilities to be sensibly included in the site.
There is one pressing reason to read this
book, however, which centers around the
designs themselves. Because of scale, it is
not possible to get a great deal of detailed
information on individual designs. But even
so, there is an abundance of basic faults in
design. Nearly half the designs specify
stages which would only be seen properly
by about half the house. The idea of building two theatres together is generally sound
from the standpoint of combining production
facilties efficiently, yet few of the many
plans put the functional areas next to each
other. Obviously it is more impressive visually to get the front lobbies adjoining, and
many opted for this, while fully half the designs have the Theatre and Music Hall completely separated.
My conclusion is that the battle to educate the architects about the machinery of
the theatre must be waged with even more
force in years to come. Not only did the
Birmingham competition produce generally
obvious theatre forms, but the limitations
imposed by some of these architectural
forms would render production nearly impossible. Our chief interest, then, in reading this work, is to acquaint ourselves with
the widespread misapprehension among
American architects concerning the true
needs and functions of a working theatre
facility.
Herbert J. Motley, Jr.
Cranbrook School

One crude way to represent Bunraku is
to call it Reader's Theatre with mixedmedia accompaniment; the mixed media
being one or more perfectly skilled Samisen
players, with real istic settings for one-fifth
life size, bodiless puppets operated by
three men who spend a lifetime learning
the mastery of puppet handling.
Of course, my analogy is crude: to call it
Reader's Theatre does not even begin to
suggest the amazing skills of the chanter
who provides every voice in the play: child,
heroine, villain, demon, and ancient. He
makes all the sounds of nature. He roars,
squeaks, sings, and wheezes in a carefully
controlled exhibition that is unparalleled in
Western Theatre. It is important, though, to

THEATER DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

FEBRUARY, 1972

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