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ABOUT THE BOOK
As the symbolists, constructivists and
surrealists of the historical avant-garde began to abandon traditional theatre
spaces and embrace the more contingent locations of the theatrical and
political ‘event’, the built environment of a performance became not only
part of the event, but an event in and of itself.
Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant
garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific
fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory
of ‘performative architecture’.
‘Event’ was of immense
significance to modernism’s revolutionary agenda, resisting realism and
naturalism – and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. Event-Space analyzes a number of
spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, both illuminating the history
of avant-garde performance and inspiring contemporary approaches to performance
space.
PREFACE:
TOWARD A THEORY OF ‘SPACING’ THROUGH AVANT-GARDE ACTION
INTRODUCTION: EVENT-SPACE: A PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR ARCHITECTURE
Architecture as Event
Event-Space: A Useful Paradigm In Motion
Space (becoming-performance of architecture)
Event (becoming-architecture of performance)
(Re)Birth of the Will-to-Destruction
Avant-gardism and Modernism
CHAPTER 1: DISCIPLINING THE BOURGEOIS GLORY MACHINE
"Our provisional theatre at Bayreuth"
The Baroque Model and Post-Revolutionary Performativity
Garnier’s Architecture as Mise-en-scène
The Glory Machine
The Case of Bayreuth
A New Public
The Invisible Theatre
CHAPTER 2: ABSOLUTE SPACE: UNIVERSAL LANDSCAPES
"The Beginning… The Birth…"
Absolute Stage Space
Symbolist "Theatre of the Mind"
Dancing Architectures
Duncan’s Temple
Spatial Rhythm and Universal Landscapes
Adolphe Appia
Architecture as Temple-Laboratory
Hellerau
Resisting the Black Void
The New Monumentality of Absolute Space
CHAPTER 3: ABSTRACT SPACE: TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE OF ALIENATION
The "Troubled Art": Avant-gardism Divided
City as a "Montage of Attractions"
Stage Space – Space Stage
Bauhaus Festivities
Total Theatre: The "Great Stage Machine"
Architectures of Alienation
Ghost in the Machine
CHAPTER 4: ABJECT SPACE: TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE OF CRUELTY
Violence Takes Centre Stage
Spatial Violence
Bravo! And Boom, Boom!
Abjection: eROTic Object
Palace of Culture
Enter Artaud (Flinging Bombs)
An Architecture against Architecture
A Site of Recovery
Dis-eased Body
Ex-ploding Space
De-centring Architecture
Cruel Machine
CONCLUSION: MAKING ARCHITECTURE TREMBLE
Nietzsche’s Architect(ure)
Building Babel