The Civic Theater Described in 5 Acts

A design driven research approach was integral to the Civic Theater project. Although the execution of the project relied heavily on intuition and formal speculation. The project studied classical typologies of civic architecture. The project also learned from other disciplines, such as theater, surveying and interpreting, different spaces of performance and narrative structures, such as from Gustav Freytag’s work.

Through my work I seek to make most of the tension between architecture as an artistic project and architecture as a civic project with a disciplinary history. Therefore, the decision to not draw the models before making them in the workshop was a conscious method. I set up a general structure with different scales, assigning each model an architectural element and architectural typology. As I was working on them over an extended period in the workshop, there was an exchange between them in terms of expression, proportions.

Through this speculative exercise, I seeked to address the following questions: How does intuitive work and architectural language give meaning to a place and a public? What is the expression of a new public architecture, and how can theatricality serve to create such?