What is Architectural Sceonography?
How might we better understand scenography as an effective analytical category for studying the history of architecture and urban design? Referring to framed or directed views and perspectives across space, scenography raises questions of spectatorship and public ceremonial. As a mode of design, scenography creates ‘scenes’ through the staging and choreography of space and through architectural and urban forms which foster distinctive visual and somatic experiences. While architectural historians and critics—including Rudolf Wittkower, Michael Fried, and Kenneth Frampton—have occasionally invoked scenography, there are no common definitions or a shared sense of the term’s scope in architectural history. Even more, there have been few dedicated studies of architectural or urban scenography, even while the concept is often acknowledged as important.
Does the theatrical understanding of scenography as ‘setting the scene’, of staging the fictional within a performance space, translate to architectural and urban scenography? Two touchstone books may help orient the panel’s scope: Daniel Savoy’s Venice from the Water (Yale, 2012), which analyses ‘water-oriented urbanistic practices’ as part of the city’s civic ceremonial and as helping construct the ‘myth of Venice’; and A Civic Utopia (Drawing Matter Studies, 2016), which identifies scenography in 18th- and 19th-century France as related to the ‘very fabric [of cities], so that … the sight of the town itself would provide pleasures in its aspects and a ready awareness of its civic, social and commercial life’. This panel invites papers exploring the design elements, spatial dynamics, and historical significance—across social, political, or economic questions—of architectural scenography from the early modern period to the present.
Session Convenor:
Paul Ranogajec, independent architectural historian, London
Speakers:
Jean-François Bédard,Syracuse University
‘Staging Surprise: Architecture and Scenography at Gilles-Marie Oppenord’s Hôtel Gaudion’
Around 1732 the French architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672–1742) designed a hôtel in Paris for the Guard of the Royal Treasury, Pierre-Nicolas Gaudion. Oppenord’s project was an exercise in the grand goût or ‘grand manner’ associated with the architecture of the seventeenth century. This presentation argues that, by reconfiguring for Gaudion seventeenth-century architectural forms and spatial configurations, particularly the more ‘scenographic’ features of the famed Hôtel Lambert by the architect Louis Le Vau, Oppenord wished to stage surprise in architecture, an essential component of the grand manner in the visual arts. Relying on a remarkably complete series of sixteen drawings by the architect, never studied in detail, this research shows that, thanks to formal features that addressed empathetic viewer response grounded in surprise, Oppenord’s Hôtel Gaudion challenges the accepted interpretations of the architect’s work as merely decorative and far removed from the public sphere.
Aline Gallasch-Hall de Beuvink, Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa/CIDEHUS
Bibiena in Lisbon: The Scenographies that Changed History
Giovanni Carlo Sicinio Galli Bibiena (1717-60), son of the famous architect Francesco Galli Bibiena (1659-1739), came to Lisbon in 1752 to construct five royal opera houses for the Portuguese king, Joseph I. He was also in charge of the machinery and scenographies for all the operas staged at those theatres. He and his team, many of them architects and painters trained at Bologna’s Clementina Academy, inaugurated the important period of stage design in 18th-century Portugal. Unfortunately, due to natural disasters such as the earthquake of 1755, and disrepair over time, all of the Opera Houses and their scenographies have disappeared. Designs for these survive only in a few drawings and engravings.
The style created by Bibiena and his team inaugurated what was later called the Bibiena School in Portugal. Although the Royal Opera Houses were important buildings and described as magnificent, there are no certain designs remaining to indicate how they looked. This paper reflects on the importance of Bibiena’s Portugal scenographies and Opera Houses as testimony of an era and their impact on stage design. It will also suggest how the remaining designs can be the basis for a reconstruction of the proscenium of one of the lost theatres.
Ciarán Rua O’Neill, University College Dublin
Staging Imperial Authority in Dublin, 1821 and 1900
Shortly following his coronation in 1821, King George IV visited Ireland, thereby initiating a tradition of official royal visits to the country that lasted until the early twentieth century. On several of these occasions, state authorities drew on Dublin’s urban scenography, alongside displays of spectacle and pageantry, to present the city as a ‘theatre’ for staging the monarch’s entrance into Ireland.
This paper will examine how Dublin was conceived as such a theatre during George IV’s 1821 visit and Queen Victoria’s final visit in 1900. It will combine a study of primary source texts, such as firsthand descriptions of the city and visits, with visual sources recording the events. The latter includes paintings and prints, by artists such as William Turner de Lond, depicting George IV’s entry into Dublin, works which themselves present the urban space as a stage-like setting, as well as photographs of Victoria’s cavalcade through its streets. It will focus especially on the ‘stages’ of Sackville Street and College Green, sites whose urban form, spatial dynamics, and architecture had been conceived and constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a scenically structured fashion. I will reveal how the urban scenography of both sites was enhanced during the visits through the elaborate decoration of streetscapes, and the coalescing of permanent architecture with ephemeral structures, such as triumphal arches. Ultimately, I will show how such a use of urban theatre aimed to communicate notions of imperial authority and unity against a background of divisive politics in Ireland.
Stéphane Gaessler, University of Toronto
Scenography of the Urban Ensemble in Soviet Architecture
This paper explores the relationship between scenography and architecture in Soviet architectural theory. After the artistic experiments of the avant-gardes, notably the constructivist theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), I will focus specifically on the evolution of concepts related to architectural and urban ensembles during the 1930s and 1940s. The theories of art historians Lev Ilyin (1880-1942), Andrey Bunin (1905-1977) and David Arkin (1899-1967) established new principles of urban composition, from various historical works addressing the visual features of urban shapes. The concept of the urban ensemble is significantly rooted in the work of David Arkin. In his book on French architecture during revolutionary times, Arkin examines 18th-century urbanism, highlighting the aspirations to cultivate a new civic consciousness. By the late 1940s, the concept of architectural ensemble evolved into the ‘Ensemble method’. This method suggests that the visual unity and scenographic layout of parts of the city reflect an ideal social organisation, allowing architects to shape the social, economic, and even anthropological and psychological morphology of cities.
Marie de Testa, Princeton University
The Writing of Architectural History as Theatre: Tafuri’s Theatrical Modernity
In his 1977 article ‘Il Teatro como Cittá Virtuale’, Manfredo Tafuri sought to account for the distance between modern architectural theory and practice, by historically analysing the relation between the experience of the modern city and contemporaneous design for the stage over the first three decades of the twentieth century in the ‘west’ and across political orientations. Tafuri argued for theatrical distance as that which enabled the relation between the stage and the city to become dialectic; my paper argues for the perceived theatricality in modern architecture as a self-reflexive mode of representation and as the staging of disciplinary critique. When the duplication of reality no longer had a place on stage in the theatre of the avant-garde, duplication understood as a form of representation was taken up by architecture as methodology. In appropriating theatrical mimesis, that is, in imitating itself, architectural design re-appeared as theatricalised.
This paper seeks to elucidate the role of theatricality in architecture—theatricality as a methodology, as a process of form-making in architecture, and as a resource in the writing of history––as a means for engaging with interwar and post-war capitalist ideology. When aware of a historical break, does architectural continuity stage a theatrical illusion? Can theatricality in architecture instead stage its critique? In other words, is it possible to think of the writing of histories of continuity, as the failure to recognise in theatricality the means to stage a critique of illusion in architecture?