02 — Travelling theatre
Theater Architecture for a European Circuit
A travelling theatre system for Northern Europe.
Info
- Location
- Hamburg, port area, Germany
- Typology
- Travelling theatre
- Practice
- Architecture, Urban design
- Context
- Collaborative classes — Politecnico di Milano AUIC with HafenCity Universität Hamburg
The relationship between theatricality and nomadism, read both as the migration of an architectural type between cities and as the itinerant nature of architecture itself.
The port of Hamburg, the city's economic engine, also becomes a culture factory: a land-based system that produces theatres on barges and exports them along the continent's rivers and coasts.
02.1
Reading the port
The project starts from the historical transformations of the port, overlaying a 1905 map onto today's logistics layout. The south bank of the Elbe, marked by cranes, gantries and moving ships, is rethought as an urban front that is both productive and cultural.
02.2
Three prototypes
Three homages, three ideas of stage space. Wagner: the linear stage of the Bayreuth theatre, designed with Gottfried Semper. Pink Floyd: a mobile stage in front of a standing audience. Shakespeare: the circular Globe theatre, with the stage at the centre and the audience all around.
02.3
A theatre on a barge
The Wagnerian prototype stands on a river barge. Below deck sit the mobile stage, built in liftable sections, and the orchestra pit; on deck follow backstage, stage, orchestra and stalls. The walls Semper used to break up sound waves become the structure itself, expressed on the façade. Vertical towers bring the audience to the tiers, a raised circuit serves the fly gallery.
02.4
Model
The physical model tests the structure: Warren trusses carry the pitched roof, the stalls step down towards the proscenium between the structural walls.
