Enriching entertainment. (Comment).

The need for public entertainment has shaped both human development and the built environment, and despite the anti-social tendancies of today's leisure technologies, it is still possible to sustain a connection with space and place.

From the Colosseum to Disneyland, humankind has come to rely on increasingly lavish circuses to supplement its daily bread. Though the notion of mass leisure per se is a relatively modem phenomenon, brought about by liberation (in the Western world at least) from the crushing yoke of labour as the working day was gradually reduced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historically, entertainment has always figured in public consciousness, from the gladiatorial spectacles of the Romans, through medieval tournaments, fairs and religious festivals, to theatre, concerts, opera and pleasure gardens, and more recently, the celluloid escapism of cinema and tribal passions of sport. Writing in La Ville Radieuse, even Corb could see that the populace occasionally needed to unwind, 'We must not forget a source of happiness, a chance to participate actively in common pursuits that will benefit the wider community'. (1)

Such forms of entertainment have generally required specialized buildings or sites that have evolved over time and also shaped the wider social, civic and economic development of cities. Theatres, for instance, are one of the oldest types of urban architecture, embodying a human need for the rituals of public performance. Over time, the theatre has assumed many forms, reflecting the successive changes of images and identity that have occurred in the presentation of drama: the strolling player, the great open amphitheatre, the intimate court theatre, the proscenium frame, to contemporary cannibalizations of existing buildings and structures. By the nineteenth century, it had also become a place for staging social rituals, in increasingly lavish promenading spaces.

The development of the theatre has a close kinship with opera, which evolved in Italy from a cross fertilization of medieval mystery plays with secular pageants and entertainments conducted, initially, in churches, but later in piazzas, as the urban realm was appropriated and transformed into a stage. Appropriately for such a scenographic city, Venice was the cradle and crucible of opera--from the piazzas it eventually moved indoors, when the first commercial opera house opened in 1637, although the city continued (and still continues) to engage in elaborate open-air spectacles and festivals.

Spectacle and the city

The idea of the city as a kind of virtual theatre has fascinated generations of urban and social historians. As Marie Christine Boyer notes, 'Both the theatre and urban space are places of representation, assemblage and exchange between actors and spectators, between the drama and the stage set. Finding their roots in the collective experience of everyday life, they are ordering experiences of that chaos. As perspectival devices, the theatre and architecture impose coherent meanings and illusory representations that determine what we call a well-made performance'. (2) Specifically, theatre played a crucial role in the transition between medieval and Baroque concepts of urban organization. Theatrical sets had an effect on urban form (manifest in symmetry and convergence), while scenography emerged from treatises on perspective. In Georgian Bath, fops and dandies paraded and postured around the streets like actors on a stage, as attractions in their own right and as amusement for others, scenes that would be fa miliar to latterday zoku (tribes) in Tokyo's Yoyogi Park, preening and pouting for tourists. By the eighteenth and nineteeneth centuries, theatres, opera houses, concert halls and museums were significant elements in grand urban designs, figuring as monumental object buildings in the Neo-Classical reordering of most European cities.

In the sprawling, centreless, contemporary city, relationships are more complex, messages more confused and notions of public entertainment undergoing profound change The discovery of the possibilities of big business associated with free time has mined a lucrative vein of mass entertainment so that leisure is now polarized between the domestic and urban scales (the sofa or the stadium). Propelled by the rapacious demands of commerce, this polarization is also driven by the media and their need to encapsulate, disseminate and feed off spectacles of all sorts, from sport to war. However, the growth of the media has also transformed perception and our relationship with the environment and society. The real is now overwhelmed by the virtual, packaged, reinterpreted and commodified. Yet the outcome is often irredeemably banal (as the recent glut of rolling televised coverage of the conflict in Iraq testifies), with the individual reduced to the marginalized status of an extra on a meaningless stage.

In attempting to find some way of rekindling a connection with reality, the experience of South warkz in south London might prove enlightening. Historically, this somewhat disreputable borough was a playground for popular pursuits such as the theatre, bear-baiting, drinking, carousing and general licentiousness. In its newly reformed and spruced-up incarnation, it still forms a setting for public entertainment of various kinds that, as in the past, have had an uplifting social and economic impact on the borough's fortunes. Though the painstakingly rebuilt Globe may strike an uncomfortably Disney-esque chord, the conversion of Giles Gilbert Scott's looming power station into an ascetic repository for modern art demonstrates both the surprising lure of high culture as a metropolitan divertissement and, equally importantly, the fascination of the physical--the building's heroic scale, the see-and-be-seen promenading spaces and the stimulating panoramas of the city.

You could just as easily look at paintings in a book, listen to music on CD or explore a world of increasingly bizarre possibilities on the Internet, but beyond the insularizing tendencies of technology, there is still a fundamental need to make an experiential connection with art, performance, space, place and the wider world. In this issue we look at projects for entertainment that make and sustain this connection. Among them are Renzo Piano's new auditoria complex in Rome (p64), which creates a lively new public place in the manner of the city's great outdoor rooms, and Mansilla and Tunon's concert hall in Leon (p42) which provides a sophisticated setting for classical music but also has wider urbanistic ambitions. In Melbourne, Lab Architects use entertainment as a catalyst for both fashionably radical architecture and an active engagement with the public realm (p55). All in their different ways illustrate the relationship of people to place and how spaces for entertainment can help to civilize and enrich the city.

(1.) Quoted in 'The City as Theatre', Dennis Sharp, The Architectural Review June l989, p62.

(2.) The City of Collective Memory: its historical imagery and architectural entertainments, Marie Christine Boyer, MIT Press, London, 1994, p74.