Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1975 - 9

THE CONSULTANT: THEN AND NOW

Associates

George Izenour
I begin my remarks this evening by asking,
"What is theatre design?" An exact definition is not
possible, but there are, however, two statements
about a century apart that demonstrate to me better
than any others the dichtomy inherent to the
problem. The first, from the pen of Victor Hugo, puts
it this way, "Theatre is two planks and passion." As
a theatre consultant I interpret this as "One plank for
the performer to perform on, one plank for the
audience to be seated at ease upon, and what passes
between them is passion." The second comes from
Groucho Marx, and here I must paraphrase slightly.
When I substitute my word "theatre" for his word
"Hollywood," it comes out like this, "Theatre is very
expensive machinery for putting skin on baloney."
Here no interpretation is needed, I'm sure. Practicing theatre consultants will no doubt agree that there
is a kernel of basic wisdom in both statements.
The art and science of successful modern theatre
design (and I believe it is both a science and an art)
requires a broad acquaintance with a considerable
fund of specialized knowledge, which makes it
essential that I recount some history and reflect a bit
on the theoretical and practical problems of design
and engineering. So as not to belabor the historical,
the theoretical, or the practical, I will limit what I
have to say concerning history and theory to the
nineteenth century, and my remarks on practical
operational matters will be continued to the contemporary scene.
Enclosed theatre auditorium design began in
Northern Italy late in the Sixteenth Century, and
within fifty years was frozen into a rigid scheme that
has been referred to ever since as the Baroque
horseshoe-shaped auditorium. By the end of the
Eighteenth Century, the vitality of the Baroque had
faded, but the radical philosophical ideas of the
enlightenment that resulted in the engineering
technology of the Nineteenth Century industrial
revolution and that, in time, eventually turned the
status quo of Western art, science, and society
upside-down and inside-out, were in the late Eighteenth Century not sufficiently developed to be
technically operative. Nevertheless, the urge toward
theatre auditorium design reform in the first threequarters of the Nineteenth Century had become
manifest.
How, when, and by whom did the break with the
Baroque occur? In the perspective of history, the last
two-and-one-half decades of the Nineteenth Century
(1875-1900) were crucial to contem porary Western
hemisphere theatre auditorium design. Two innova-

USITT

THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

George Izenour

SUMMER. 1975

tive theatre buildings, one European and, as might
surprise you, one American, were the first to depart
from the Baroque and set the course for Twentieth
Century theatre auditorium design reform in both
Europe and America. In Germany there was the
Bayreuth Festspielhaus, opening in 1876, and in
America, the Chicago Auditorium Theatre in 1889.
These were the first large-scale public auditoria to be
rationally designed so far as conscious effort by their
designers enabled each spectator to adequately view
the stage. In the light of present knowledge insofar
as acoustic design is concerned, however, each can
be considered the result of fortunate empirical design
only. A third auditorium, Boston's Symphony Hall,
opened in 1900; although a classical shoebox-shaped
concert hall that in a sense copied earlier designs
(notably Vienna's Musikvereinssaal and Dresden's
Gewandhaus), it was notwithstanding, the first auditorium to be rationally predesigned acoustically.
Altogether, these three designs mark the division
between two opposite theatre auditorium design
philosophies: the Nineteenth Century empirically
conceived and architecturally executed aristocratically seated auditorium versus the Twentieth Century
scientifically derived and engineering executed
democratically seated auditorium.
The central idea for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus
unquestionably originated with composer-dramatist
Richard Wagner. That for the Chicago Auditorium
Theatre I attribute to engineer-architect Dankmar
Adler, and Boston Symphony Hall surely belongs to
physicist Wallace Clement Sabine. These three
auditoria encompass a broader spectrum of revolutionary ideas than any other period of comparable
length in the history of Western theatre auditorium
design. Each was brought about by an original
thinker and a diverse natural talent, ranging from
Wagner's artistic sensibility to Adler's engineering
practicality, and, finally, to Sabine's search for
scientific proof. These three designs were the
harbinger of things to come that radically, and for all
time, altered the relation of theatre design to
architecture, and in this connection three other
events and the personalities associated with them are
important.
The first of these occured thirty-eight years before
the opening of Bayreuth Festspielhaus. In 1838, an
essay was read before the Royal Scottish Society of
the Arts by John Scott Russell, Engineer. To this day
this short illustrated essay is the most explicit,
rational, and certainly for its time, the most radical
statement ever made on auditorium sight lines since

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