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DESCRIPTION
The award-winning design for
Performance Theater 1999 was commissioned
for a 1.5-acre site, currently a 150-car parking lot surrounded by
movie studio back lots and the headquarters of a leading record
company. The site is also in close proximity to a network of pedestrian
and vehicular ramps - walkways, collector and arterial streets, a
traffic interchange and a freeway - making it a juncture, so to speak,
of Los Angeles' car and entertainment cultures.
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The
transformation of
the site from a parking lot into a space for communal recreation and
social interaction is built upon the idea of an urban garden. The thin
surface of the blacktop is sliced away, and the theater, taking the
form of a flower, rises from the cultivable asphalt. The basic forms
were developed by tracing projected photographic studies of flowers on
black paper, which was then cut with a steel blade to locate the
initial theater section and develop its structure.
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The theater
itself, an 18,000
square-foot multimedia performance space for music, film and TV
productions, unfurls in asymmetrical, organic forms from a deep
underground base, or plinth. The plinth acts as the structure's
foundation in a literal and figurative sense: it incorporates the
theater's three-level parking garage - symbolically subsuming the
site's original function - and the programmatic roots of the entire
structure. The garage's ramps, which are in themselves abstracted
references to the freeway interchanges that define Los Angeles in the
popular imagination, spiral upward toward the surface like shoots from
a seed.
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A
thrust stage for live performances
lies just below grade, from which three distinct seating areas open in
a petal-like arrangement that determines the building's unique floral
form. Two of the petals, seating 750 persons, span upward from the
stage at right angles to each other. A third, which can accommodate 250
seats, is adjacent to the other two but placed outside the theater,
facing a large projection-screen wall. This exterior petal arcs toward
the street to create an amphitheater for open-air concerts or film
presentations. In addition, the screen wall is engineered with a
retractable door system, enabling it to be opened so that all three
seating areas can be utilized for performances in the round.
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The vertical façade of
the
structure cants outward from the petals, appearing to defy gravity, and
unfolds at radically broken angles to the top edge. Functioning as a
theatrical curtain between the spectacle and the spectators, the
façade cloaks the infrastructure with a dynamic movement frozen
in time. Its bottom edges flit at off-angles to the structural steel
frame of the ground floor and the hard petals supporting the interior
seating blocks, and its vertical planes part in a kind of a slip space
just above the entrance.
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The
façade is clad in
powder-coated, pre-weathered galvalume sheathing to create a diffusely
reflective surface. On the building's southern edge, which faces the
street and the outdoor amphitheater, a structural glass curtain wall
rises from below grade to welcome the public with a sensation of
openness and pedestrian scale. The theater's interior is flooded with
natural light from skylights incorporated into a space-frame roof
structure. The skylights are composed of an advanced LCD technology
that allows its panels to change from transparent to opaque with the
flip of a switch. The roof structure also houses control rooms and
catwalks for access to lighting and sound systems.
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