Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1978 - 8

Historical Background
The first permanent theatre in the Western world, built on
the south flank of the Athenian Acropolis in the fourth century
B.C., like the nineteenth-century theatre forms, had only to
satisfy a single, fixed set of performance and audience requirements.
The evolution of enclosed contemporary theatre auditorium design began in northern Italy late in the sixteenth century. Within fifty years it was frozen into the rigid scheme that
ever since has been referred to as "the baroque horseshoeshaped auditorium." By the end of the eighteenth century, the
vitality of the baroque had faded, but the upsetting ideas that
resulted in the engineering techniques of the industrial revolution, and which eventually turned the prevalent status quo
of Western art, science, and society upside-down and insideout, were not sufficiently developed to be technically operative. The nineteenth century in Western Europe, except for
the design of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, was but a repetition
of the eighteenth century. The last two-and-one-half decades
of the ninteenth century (1875-1900), however, in both Europe and America were crucial to contemporary American
theatre auditorium design. Two innovative theatre buildings
departed from the baroque and altered the course of twentieth-century auditorium design.
The Bayreuth Festspielhaus (1876) and the Chicago Auditorium-Theatre (1889) were the first large-scale public auditoria anywhere to be rationally designed in that conscious
effort by their designers enabled each spectator to adequately view the stage. In light of present knowledge of
acoustics design, however, each can be considered the result
only of fortunate empirical design. A third, Boston Symphony
Hall (1900), although a "classical" shoebox-shaped, acoustically live, end stage concert hall auditorium, was the first
auditorium ever to be rationally predesigned acoustically.
Altogether, these three designs mark the division between
two rival proscenium-theatre auditorium design philosophies-the nineteenth-century empirically conceived and architecturally executed aristocratic versus the twentieth-century scientifically derived and engineering executed
democratic.
The central idea for Bayreuth Festspielhaus originated with
composer-dramatist Richard Wagner. That for Chicago Auditorium-Theatre is attributed to engineer-architect Dankmar
Adler. Boston Symphony Hall belongs to physicist Wallace
Clement Sabine. These three auditoria encompass the
broadest spectrum of revolutionary ideas for any period of
comparable length in the history of Western theatre design.
Each was brought about by an original thinker and a diverse
natural talent, ranging from Wagner's artistic sensibility,
through Adler's engineering practicality, and fi nally to Sabine's search for scientific proof. These designs were the
harbinger of things to come that, in the United States, radically altered the relation of theatre design-engineering to
architecture. How this came about requires some understanding of the social, political, artistic, and scientific mores
of the past two centuries. It begins at the time of the American
and French revolutions, encompasses the nineteenth-century
Western European industrial revolution and finally, since
World War II, in the United States, takes full advantage of the
worldwide twentieth-century technological revolution.
The theatre auditoria of the baroque, and the empirical
origins of the acoustically live, shoebox-shaped concert hall
for the presentation of absolute music, are so well-known to
theatre historians, architects and theatre designers that the
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Theatre Design & Technology

design principles and the social, economic, and political systems that produced them need not be further belabored here.
It must, however, be recognized that, on the average, between twenty and forty percent of all seats in the stacked ring
balconies of these theatres were subject to severe angular
sightline distortion and by today's standards of design
cannot be considered good seats. (From many the stage is
not visible at aiL) Analysis is based on criteria set forth in an
essay written in 1838 by the Scottish engineer John Scott
Russell1-criteria upon which design parameters for seating
systems in modern auditoria is based. Architects, however,
have in the past (and on occasion still), to their peril, either
Willfully ignored or paid scant attention to these criteria.
The impasse to rational theatre auditorium design was
broken by composer-dramatist Richard Wagner, and precisely because he insisted that every spectator in the auditorium should be able to see the stage in an unimpeded manner. Wagner, acting on his own in the rural Franconian town
of Bayreuth, impelled only by the forces of rational artistic
necessity in matters of auditorium design, achieved the initial
breakthrough in 1876. Adler, working in 1889 in Chicago,
impelled only by economic forces and having to make a
single large auditorium work for every kind of public performance, reacted as only a rational, pragmatic-minded man
would. Sabine, on the other hand, confronted in 1900 with the
practical problem of what to do about an existing architectural acoustical disaster, reacted as only a scientist could.
His intellectual curiosity, once aroused, would not let him rest
until the riddle of the general case precisely defining room
acoustics design parameters was solved. His postulation of
the mathematical relationship between volume and absorption finally led to discovery of the reverberation equation and
at long last provided theatre designers with the essential
means (among others more detailed and technical) whereby
the specific characteristics of auditoria for speech (non-reverberant and highly articulate) and those for music (reverberant but not overly so) were not only precisely differentiated mathematically, but could now be pre-designed as well.

Bayreuth Festspielhaus
Wagner envisioned the Bayreuth Festspielhaus as a revival
of the classical festival theatre of ancient Greece although this
was true only in a romantic sense. The exigencies of an outsized, mechanized, proscenium stage for nineteenth-century
music-drama, fronted by a pit large enough for a one hundred and twenty-five piece symphony orchestra, placed strict
angular and distance tolerances to the single level of a
steeply rising seatbank contained within a roofed auditorium
that, in section, had to be held to a sixty-degree wedge if the
lateral sightline criteria for seeing into the stage were to be
preserved (Figure II). Wagner's preoccupation with the visual
aspects of nineteenth-century music-drama also required
that the orchestra be heard but not seen. This further modification of baroque design convention made it essential that
the pit be cowled across the front and at the same time
extend deep beneath the forestage.
To achieve greater seating efficiency in a single level auditorium, all inner circulatory aisles and crossovers were dispensed with in favor of a system of curvilinear, transverse,
continuous rows connected through multiple doors in the
sidewalls to longitudinal side aisles outside the auditorium.
For the first time, what is now referred to as continental
seating became reality. Wagner's only acquiescence to baroque tradition was a row of boxes across the rear wall of the
auditorium, with the center one reserved for his chimeric
USITT/Summer. 1978
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1978
