If They Come, You Will Build It
IN ENGLISH THE WORD THEATRE REFERS BOTH to the art form and to the place in which it is being presented. Both meanings, and the connection between the two, are currently being radically redefined. And that redefinition is reflected in the buildings themselves.
“I do not even know what state-of-the-art means anymore,” confesses Joshua Dachs, a principal of the New Yorkbased theatre design firm Fisher Dachs Associates, currently involved in projects under construction around the world.
The most high-profile changes at the moment are in Manhattan. How, in a city that already has 1,200 cultural institutions, can a new one stand out? That’s the question Michael Bloomberg posed when he was mayor of New York City. Fourteen years later, a Brit named Alex Poots is running a $475 million response to the question, situated on Manhattan’s far West Side. The Shed comprises five spaces for shows and exhibitions, with its two main spaces being the Griffin, which can seat 500, and the McCourt, a cavernous theatre 120 feet high offering up to 1,200 seats for theatrical spectacles and 2,000 standing for rock concerts. The latter space can also disappear entirely, as a movable outer shell retracts onto the building to create an outdoor plaza for “large-scale, site-specific” works.
Critics have given mixed reviews to the Shed’s work so far, from a performance piece in the Griffin, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, featuring Ben Whishaw and Renée Fleming, to the “kung fu musical” Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise in the McCourt. The disapproval has extended beyond the shows onstage. In his New York Times review of Dragon Spring, Jesse Green wrote that “the Shed…supported with $75.5 million in public funds, needs to set higher goals than those of a high-end mall.”
For all the rough reception of its inaugural efforts, the Shed already architect critic Michael Kimmelman, decried for its glorification of “surface spectacle.” By contrast, at the official opening of the Shed in the spring, Elizabeth Diller, one of its architects, spoke of the arts center as something of a mission, calling the building “an anti-institutional institution” and a facility “perpetually unfinished” that aims to cater to artists and audiences of the future.
