Art centres.

From the first, humanity has created special places in which to contain and intensify the powers of art. The tradition continues in the post-modern world with buildings that explore the potential of art for centring the individual place and space.

From their earliest manifestations, the arts have had dangerous power. From the paintings of Lascaux and the beginnings of the theatre in Ancient Greece to medieval mystery plays and flickering images on the cinema screen, the arts have clarified and intensified people's relationships to nature, the Gods and each other. This magic power has usually been celebrated by creating special places in which it can be contained and intensified. When, 15 000 years ago, the first ancestors with whom we can feel any kinship tapped magic and made the marks that translated irregular rock bumps and fissures into the limbs of terrifyingly powerful bison and reindeer, they chose to work on very special places: caverns deep in the bowels of the mountains, often reached with difficulty from the palaces in which they normally lived.

In the fifth century BC (so much closer to us that it seems modern by comparison), the Greeks invented the theatre as a new type of building to contain a newly formalised art form. Robert van Pelt argues that 'with the invention of the theater architecture has become philosophy or theology because it shares with these realms of discourse the task and the power to create a unified representation of the world that can be taken in at once. It represents the world, but it has ceased to be the world'.(1) Whether it is only the theatre which has the power to relate the past through the present to the future, and whether it has such a fundamental relationship to architectural theory must be moot, for surely all forms of imaginative literature make spatial and temporal links, and a novel, for instance, does not have to be experienced in a particular building type.

But a building is needed to let us experience a play communally, rather than by reading it as individuals, and it is this shared element of artistic experience that generates the theatre, the gallery and concert hall. The word theatre is derived from the Greek theatron (a place for seeing).(2) The original Greek theatres were carved out of hillsides, and had nothing to separate the actors and audience from the landscape behind. Richard Sennett suggests that, in Periclean times, the Pynx Hill theatre had no backdrop, so the voice of the speaker 'came to the audience out of the immense space of the land which lay behind him, the sole mediation between the mass of citizens and that panorama of hills and sky'.(3) Besides being a frontier between the space of the gods and that of mankind (and a theatre in more or less our sense), the Pynx was the place of political assembly, where individual citizens would address their fellows in much the same way as did the actors. This multivalency of theatrical space was lost as functions became increasingly specialised and political systems more authoritarian.

In post Periclean times, Athenians started to use the skene, a wood and cloth backdrop to the stage to increase the acoustic qualities of the space. The Romans developed the skene into the scaena, the masonry backdrop which permanently separated audience and action from the landscape. They evolved the amphitheatre, which is in some senses two theatres joined together. Here, particularly when the velaria (cloth shades) were drawn over, there was no possibility of being able to look out to the spaces of the gods, but the gods were brought inside the space. Sennett cites the Roman analyst Martial's description of a play in which a sacrificial actor was dressed up as Orpheus and then 'suddenly attacked and killed by a bear that materialises "spontaneously" through a trap door from the arena basement'.(4) As Katherine Welch has remarked, the Roman amphitheatre, with its elaborate stage machinery and sets '"improved" on myth by actually making it happen'.(5)

Greek and Roman theatres, though so similar in some ways, are at opposite ends of a spectrum of buildings for the arts. In the Roman model, all is focused on the performance: even if we ignore the brutality and horror of many of the spectacles, the theatre director and his creations are given supreme power. Perhaps the nearest modern analogue is the film. Is it entirely coincidental that the most extreme contemporary portrayals of violence in art are to be found in the cinema - or that the cinema, more than all other types of contemporary building for the arts, demands total attention to the spectacle?

The Greek pattern allows many different readings of both performance and people's relationships to it, each other and the world. Unsurprisingly, it is the Roman model that has been pursued almost exclusively throughout history. So many people, from emperors to priests to artists themselves have been concerned to exercise the power which focus on performance gives that the Roman lesson can never be ignored. Indeed, it has been so powerful that it is almost impossible for us to see what role the Greek model might play in our culture.

Almost, but not quite. We have none of the intimacy of different aspects of life which allowed the Greeks to use the Pynx as theatre, assembly and court, so there are no buildings which attempt to contain such a wide range of human uses and experiences. But the development of the great theatres and opera houses of the nineteenth century did add new dimensions to the experience of going to the theatre. In the grandest of them all, the Paris Opera, Charles Garnier offered a magnificent promenade from the entrance up the grand stair to the foyer and galleries. An experience other than concentration on the spectacle was offered as the haute bourgeoisie of the Third Republic promenaded through the grandiose ornate spaces.

In the twentieth century, there have been numerous experiments with the form of the auditorium in efforts to break the power of the proscenium arch and make the action more central to the audience. From Gropius's 1927 Total-Theater project on, such strategies have paradoxically brought the members of audience into new relationships with each other as well as to the spectacle. The potential of this approach is nowhere better seen than in Hans Scharoun's masterpiece, the Philharmonie in Berlin (1963), admittedly a concert hall, but one in which much of the innovative thinking about theatre of the previous 50 years was realised. Scharoun emphasised 'Music as the focal point: this was the keynote from the very beginning ... Here, you will find no segregation of "producers" and "consumers" ... Despite its size, the auditorium has retained a certain intimacy, enabling a direct and co-creative share in the production of music'.(6) Here is a long forgotten dimension of the relation of spectacle to spectators, one which captures some of the directness and complexity of the Greek experience. This richness is greatly added to by the foyer, which is interlaced with the winding routes which lead to what Scharoun called the 'vineyard terraces' of seats in the auditorium. In many ways, this is the twentieth century's interpretation of Garnier's promenade, but much more democratic, offering many different paths, levels, observation points and places for congregating in groups as small as a couple or as large as a party.(7)

The 1984 Stuttgart Staatsgalerie by Stirling and Wilford offers somewhat parallel experiences in a building devoted to the plastic arts. We have no examples of the gallery from the ancient world, and our oldest examples date from the Renaissance when they were based on parts of palaces, the fountains of state order. By the nineteenth century, the great galleries, like Semper's Vienna Kunsthistorisches Hofmuseum (1872-79), structured their pictures and sculptures as illustrations to a story of the development of art imposed by the museum director.(8) The didactic plot was echoed in the route through the spaces, the equivalent of the social promenade through Garnier's Opera.

The Stuttgart building is both rejection and affirmation of established pattern. As Stirling remarked when the building opened, 'We hope that the Staatsgalerie is monumental, because that is a tradition for public buildings, but also we hope that it is informal and populist, hence the anti-monumentalism of the meandering footway and the voided centre'.(9) There is in fact a story told by the museum director in the enfilade galleries which house the permanent collection on the upper level. But the formal route can be altered at will by individuals who may leave it at many points to make short cuts over the terraces or descend in the open drum to cafe and the temporary exhibitions. So each visitor can enact a personal subplot in counterpoint, or even contradiction to the main story.(10)

Both the Philharmonie and the Staatsgalerie are heroic buildings which brilliantly use post-modern (though not PoMo) devices to provide physical and mental space for the individual against the collapse of traditional perceptions of space and time imposed by the condition of post-modernity. It is appropriate that they house the arts, for they (and a few other contemporary buildings which have the same basic function) distil for our time some of the magic with which our ancestors imbued their special places for celebrating imaginative understanding and creativity - and the present's link between past and future. P.D.

1 van Pelt, Robert Jan (with Carroll William Westfall), Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, p242.

2 Sennett, Richard, Flesh and Stone, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1994, p58.

3 Ibid, p60.

4 Ibid, p98. Sennett is quoting from an unpublished thesis by Katherine Welch The Roman Amphitheater after Golvin, New York University Institute of Fine Arts.

5 Ibid, p99.

6 Quoted in Blundell Jones, Peter, Hans Scharoun, Phaidon, London, 1995, p178.

7 Ibid, pp 186-187 for a detailed discussion of the foyer.

8 Semper himself was obsessed by the powers of comparative, classificatory science and his thinking was partly based on the work of the great French zoologist Cuvier. See Hvattum, Mari 'Gottfried Semper: Towards a Comparative Science of Architecture', Architectural Research Quarterly, vol I, pp68-75.

9 Quoted in Neue Staatsgalerie und Kammertheater Stuttgart, pub Finanzministerium Baden-Wuttemberg, Stuttgart, 1984, p9.

10 For a detailed description of the potential of the paths see Davey, Peter, 'Stuttgart', AR CXCI, December 1992, pp38-46.