Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1975 - 13

he must have a wide knowledge and a solid sense of
the limitations as well as the capabilities of modern
technology and architecture that will allow him to
make constructive, innovative use of the former to
enhance the latter in a way that is never prejudicial
to performance.
Finally, I make the observation that since the
theatre came indoors to stay during the late Renaissance, architecture has never played the decisive role
where an essential understanding of the performeraudience relation is concerned. Its Twentieth Century
practitioners, particularly when unaided by theatre
design-engineering consultants, cannot be said to
have reacted at all rationally so far as design is
concerned or at times even realistically so far as
budget is concerned in meeting the changing exigencies of theatres designed for single use or for the
more complex synthesis of multiple-use. Every
theatre design innovation, whether empirically or
theoretically derived, eventually achieves scientific
understanding that, depending on circumstances,
has sometimes preceded and sometimes followed
elegant engineering execution. The explicit details of
theatre history have demonstrated conclusively that
the essential theatre design reforms of the past

century have been brought about mostly in spite of
architecture, and it is indeed unfortunate that the
theatre's technical developement has been recorded
by theatre and architectural historians, who on the
one hand have obscured these essential facts in
academ ic rhetoric, and on the other have confused
them between style and social symbolism of theatre
design as architecture, and the end is not yet.
Now, to conclude, I go back to an earlier time to
an occasion during a period of disruptive social
change and cultural shock that was much like our
own. Near the end of his life, when he had retired
from science and was heavy with honors, Sir Isaac
Newton was asked why it was that he had been able
to see farther than any other natural philosopher of
his time into the mathematical abstractions upon
which our fundamental knowledge of classical physics is based. Newton's answer was for all time, when
with consummate grace he replied: "Sir, I stood on
the shoulders of giants." The giants he was referring
to were Copernicus and Galileo. As you have seen fit
to honor me here tonight, it is essential that I share
this honor with the memory of John Scott Russell,
Carl Brandt, Dankmar Adler, and Wallace Clement
Sabine.
*

USITT
CONFERENCE 1976
March

10,11,12,13
New Orleans
Louisiana

Plan
Now
to

Attend
USITI

THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

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