by Peter Smith
Peter Smith is one of Canada's leading Theatre Architects. The following was delivered as the Keynote Address at the CITT Conference in Stratford on October 15, 1994.
We have enjoyed our association with theatre people. I think this is partly due to the fact that we have many things in common. Architecture is also a crazy business which makes no sense from the hours worked or from the responsibilities and risks incurred; we do it because we want to, we enjoy the challenge and the sense of accomplishment.
My observations suggest that, generally, architects are not looked on with great favour by theatre people. As a longstanding member of CITT I am exposed to occasional derogatory comments about architects and the difficult or illogical facilities that they have created. One Newsletter item I remember was a make-believe dialogue about a new building between the theatre staff and the architect. The architect behaved in an egotistical and unsympathetic fashion and was generally the butt of the article.
I can¹t defend all architects from those accusations but I would suggest that the term ³architect² covers a broad range of skills and personalities, and that while many architects may behave in such a fashion, some architects are indeed most anxious to learn from and listen to building users, in this case the theatre production staff.
I do not intend to turn this address into a defence of my profession, but it may be beneficial at this point to outline briefly how an architect is selected and what the design and construction process entails.
Theatres are considered an important public resource and, because of their role in the community or their location, it will likely be the upper levels of client representation who are involved in the selection of the architect. Politicians and senior business types loom large at this stage of the process. While the production staff may have been consulted on the broad scope of the project, they are unlikely to be seriously involved when the architect is selected.
Aside from judging the presentations from each of the firms, the selection group may also be focused on the desire to have a landmark innovative building, without any real perception of the importance of function in this particular building type.
Once on board, the architect is usually presented with a program of space requirements and relationships. This document may have been generated by the staff (current staff, that is) or a consultant, or simply the administration.
The architect¹s schematic designs must blend this wish list with the budget and organize it on the particular site or within the existing structure. The judgment on when the architect has achieved the best possible arrangement probably rests with a committee reporting to the Board. Sometimes the production staff is represented on that committee, but not always.
The approval of the design is a fundamental step in the process. Many doors are now shut. If the committee, architect or consultants have missed something or misunderstood something then it may be difficult to change at a later stage.
The next stage in our work is the preparation of working drawings and specifications for the Construction Tender. This is the major portion of the architect¹s work from a time and fee standpoint. These documents are developed from the approved design and will detail all parts of the building. It¹s at this stage that the wrong hardware is specified, the doors that are too small are drawn and the noisy air handling system is specified.
Prior to Tenders being called, these documents are circulated to the client for a final review. It¹s my experience that this last check is not taken seriously enough by the production staff. All of the deficiencies which will be noted during construction and after occupancy can be determined from these drawings and specifications ‹ and corrected with minimum cost and confusion.
Unfortunately the documents usually look somewhat forbidding in their nature and quantity. It¹s obviously easier to review items when they are visible in three dimensions, but by that time it will most costly and difficult to change.
This is a bit of a soap box of mine, but I would like to underline this important responsibility of the client and the staff of the client. I can recall a situation when we were almost complete on one of the stages of the duMaurier Theatre at Harbourfront when I came across a door that the production staff had drawn on a drywall partition, noting that there should be a door there.
I should note at this point that there are significant outside influences on the overall design and even the details. Some of these will inevitably become the fault of the architect in the minds of the owner. Building and fire codes are of course motherhood issues, but do sometimes present problems because generally they were not written with theatres in mind, and consequently do not address the special situations related to performance. This many be as simple as the battle we have with the first stage alarm ringing in the auditoriums and the difficultly that it presents, and how it¹s not the way it should be done. But it is sometimes very hard to persuade an official that it makes sense.
Sometimes the building and fire officials will recognize this and assist in the formulation of an equivalent solution which reflects the theatre functions; other times they insist on the letter of the law regardless of our explanations.
Unlike a show, the success of a building cannot be judged at its opening; it takes a while for the building to be tested, or to show whether it has successfully met the mandate or the requirements given to the architect. Many times these requirements change after the building is occupied.
In 1968 the administration offices for the Shaw Festival were in a small store on Queen Street when we started the design of the Festival Theatre. While the staff could appreciate the need for more room, the new space programme only listed about twice the area of the store. Incidentally, air conditioning was listed as optional.
Fortunately, in this case we anticipated more of an increase in the required space, and made allowances in the structure for a series of future mezzanines. The air conditioning was added almost immediately, and all mezzanine possibilities have now been constructed. Even so, there is barely enough space for the current operation.
The workshop ‹ which seemed adequate to the excellent Building Committee, and paradise to the production staff who had been struggling in small spaces associated with the Courthouse ‹ has, of course, proved to be quite inadequate for the amount of construction required for the current Festival seasons. A large new facility has been constructed in nearby Virgil. The original program represented the wisdom of the moment, everyone participated, and while the budget prevented any generous excesses, no one came close to predicting the current operation or requirements.
We had a similar experience at the Grand in London, where set construction is now done in a larger, cheaper space away from the theatre. In retrospect this may well be the way it should be, although Theatre Aquarius (100k image) in Hamilton still constructs sets in the shop we built as part of that complex. It is still the early days and that may or may not continue if the scale or quantity of shows change.
It¹s worth noting that space in a new theatre complex does come with a premium, and serious thought should always be given to what is really required under the same roof. Nice though it would be, dead storage for costumes and props is not an economical use of space in the new complex.
To return to the Shaw Festival. In 1968, when I was a partner of Ron Thom, we were retained to design a new theatre on the parking lot behind the Courthouse in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was to be a proscenium theatre, the flagship performance space for the summer festival of works by Shaw and his contemporaries.
Visits and reviews of the new facilities at MTC, the NAC and the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto were helpful, but the key to the project was the working committee created by the client to assist the architects.
The committee incorporated the best available expertise on all aspects of theatre ‹ Andis Celms from the National Arts Centre, Bill Wylie from the Stratford Festival, Paxton Whitehead the Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, Muriel Sherrin the General Manager and Calvin Rand representing the Board. We learned a tremendous amount from this group. The project took five years to come to fruition, the site was changed, and the building was quickly redesigned to suit the less contentious property on Wellington Street. The new theatre was opened in 1973.
That was really the first new theatre that we had done and it was a real learning experience. I think that was also learned a lot from seeing it finally in three dimensions as a solid building. Ongoing additions and changes have also been part of our education. These have included additions to the box office, workshop, wardrobe, administration all made possible by the provisions in the structure for mezzanines. This year we are adding rehearsal space as a mezzanine in the shop.
The reconstruction of the Grand Theatre for the newly founded Theatre London occurred a few years later and allowed us to implement some of the lessons learnt at Shaw. It also exposed us to a fine old theatre, which provided a whole range of other lessons about auditorium design and scale.
This was an extremely difficult construction project. The original theatre had been cheaply built ‹ a commercial venture to access the revenue potential of the turn-of-the-century touring circuits. The site was very restrictive; the space program totalled twice the area of the existing building including adjacent stores. During the working drawings the artistic and production personnel were changed completely, and while there were quick amendments to some areas, I think the initial staff was slightly frustrated with some of the idiosyncrasies of their predecessors.
Now ‹ twenty or so theatres later ‹ we¹re better able to evaluate requests and, hopefully, eliminate some of the illogical demands, or at least structure them into a way that allows future adjustment.
Our recent designs for Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton benefitted from an intensive involvement from Peter Mandia and Steve Newman from the very beginning. It seems that all of the new theatres that we¹ve done have a gestation period of about four to five years. No one believes that at the beginning, but it seems to work out that way.
Peter and Steven¹s interest in everything that we drew in detail became legendary in the office. They even learned the language of hardware numbers, and would ask questions like ³why was there a 1461 closure specified for the door and not a 4133?², which would send me rushing to the phone to talk to somebody who knew the answer. The resulting facility reflects their important contributions. I don¹t think we had a client that has looked at everything in quite the detail that they did at Aquarius.
Even the Princess of Wales Theatre (104k image) had a gestation period of sorts, although the final exercise took only about 20 months from David Mirvish¹s phone call to start design to the opening of the theatre in the spring of 1993.
Some years earlier we had been involved in the schematic design of a temporary theatre on the same site to house Phantom of the Opera. It¹s hard to imagine someone building a theatre that they will just throw away when the show¹s over. However, looking at The Princess of Wales, the construction cost, without the parking garage, was about $17 to $18 million. Putting the show in there was about $13 million. Suddenly, you can see that the building and show are not that different.
In the case of the Princess, we were building an old-fashioned Road House, it was a project generated by the opportunity to make money. Without the guaranteed success of Miss Saigon the theatre would not have been built.
It was a very tight site, and we were given a size of stage and size of audience that were dictated by the show. We had ambitions at the beginning that we would be able to work with the people who designed the show ‹ and who were going to run the show ‹ in putting the theatre together. That was not to be the case, because by the time any of those people had contracts we had built the theatre.
It became a generic road house theatre that had a stage big enough for Saigon and an audience big enough to make the sort of money that the Mirvishes felt they needed. The rest was really left to us.
The client relationship was extraordinary through that project. I don¹t think that it would have been possible to build a theatre of the size in the time that it took without somebody sitting and the same table saying ³yes² and ³no² to decisions regarding money and changes and additions.
When we opened the Shaw Festival Theatre we noted that hardly any, if any, of the workmen attending that performance had been to live theatre before. They saw theatre as being something that was not for them, too intellectual, too elitist.
That surprised me. I feel that one of the major flaws of theatre in North America is that it is still considered elitist by far too many people. The theatres were buildings you only entered if you had purchased a ticket. The performances or programmes were often pretentious ‹ in locations and environments where that should not be the case.
As architects, we are obviously not in a position to influence that to any great extent, but we have attempted to reflect our concern in a number of ways. One is trying to make people aware of the breadth of what the term theatre covers. It isn¹t simply drama, it covers everything on stage including rock concerts and magic shows ‹ all of this is theatre. While we cannot dictate or influence programming, we have, in the new theatres that we have built, tried to create as much potential programming flexibility as possible.
A case in point is the duMaurier Theatre Centre at Harbourfront. Originally, the terms of reference described a music venue. The project came to pass because an acoustician¹s report raved about the potential for the space, seeing it as a world class chamber music venue. It was obvious that there would not be sufficient audience for chamber music to fully support the project. Therefore, in designing it we did as much as we could to make it a space which could accommodate a variety of activities, including theatre in many forms, as well as music.
It took a few years and a couple of phases of construction to get all of the elements in place: the acoustic banners, the lighting and sound systems, the air conditioning, and all of the seating variations. The initial theatre programming concentrated on end stage performances, and the technicians tried desperately to turn it into a proscenium theatre ‹ and cursed the idiot architect who had created all their problems.
The adjacent Premier Dance Theatre provides a conventional proscenium setting, while the DuMaurier Theatre Centre has tremendous potential for other arrangements, and offers a great deal of scope to directors and designers. Very special set-ups are possible, but you have to work with the room and not pretend that it¹s another kind of theatre.
I should describe the hall for those who aren¹t familiar with it. It is a tall rectangular building which had been built to store ice for the Terminal Warehouse facility, now Queens Quay Terminal. On all four walls we added two seating galleries, a technical ledge and, at the highest level, a walk-on grid which covers the entire room.
About a third of the room has seats on risers that retract to leave a flat floor. The centre section is depressed and contains a series of Rosco platforms that can be raised or lowered individually to create more flat floor or a variety of profiles ‹ including a continuation of the retractable risers to create the end stage setting.
I remember an Equity Showcase performance directed by Robin Phillips which used the retractable platforms to create a central stage which had seating on all four sides. The galleries on all walls reinforced the surround form and in this particular production ‹ which was about the early use of anaesthetics ‹ there was an operating room sequence where the audience overlooking the operations became part of the overall experience in a way that would be impossible in a proscenium theatre.
Michael Levine designed a set for the first production of Tectonic Plates which lowered all the platforms and added a vinyl liner to create a central pool. This, together with objects flown above and into the pool created an extraordinary theatrical environment. The wood floor is still recovering.
Finally, easy public access into our theatres is something we have attempted to encourage. We have tried to convince the administrators of the theatres that they should change from collecting tickets at the door to collecting them rather deeper in the facility ‹ perhaps at the auditorium doors. This permits more general public access into the building and, of course, avoids the congestion at the door created by ticket collection. This also allows people to go into the building to look around without having a ticket in their hand, making the building more accessible in the broader sense.
This is the case at the Princess of Wales, where we attempted to allow access not only to the box office, but also the souvenir shops, the washrooms and the lower lounge bar. Currently, during the day, only the box office and sometimes one of the souvenir shops are accessible; the remainder of the ground floor space is cordoned off. However, prior to performance time the spaces are open as planned and you can, in fact, meet someone in the lounge or look around without a ticket. This accessibility is something we have suggested at all our recent theatres and some are, in fact, operating this way.
So generally, as architects, we are taking instructions and attempting to bring our building design skills to bear on the problem in a way that integrates all the wishes and requirements of the owner into a pleasing, functional building. A building that recognizes present and future operation.
As I have described, it is most important that the production staff recognize that the communication of their thoughts and ideas at an early stage are crucial to the success of the facility. You cannot wait for construction to start.
A successful theatre building has to be a collaboration. The Architect needs the benefit of your knowledge and experience. Establishing positive communication is the key.
