interweave: theatre in the urban fabric
M.A. Hellriegel (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
J.S. Zeinstra – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
M. Parravicini – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Theatre was once part of the city. In ancient Athens as well as Elizabethan London, it was embedded in public life and the streets surrounding it. Over time, it withdrew into an institution with a clear inside and outside, a front and a back, a public and a private. Today, most theatres open half an hour before curtain and stay empty the rest of the day.
This project takes that withdrawal as its starting point. It asks whether the lines that separate the theatre from the city are inevitable, or whether architecture can draw them differently.
By placing the theatre within an existing urban block in the centre of Delft, organising it around a public street that runs through its back of house, and exposing the processes normally hidden from view, the project attempts to make the threshold between theatre and city productive: an indoor street taking the passing resident behind the scenes, workshop windows framing the carpenter for the city and the city for the carpenter or the back wall of the stage opening onto the street.
The result is a building that does not present itself as a cultural destination set apart from daily life, but as one that tries to become part of it.