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Theatre Architecture: A Derivation of the Primal Cavity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2022

Donald M. Kaplan
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Extract

Among the cultural odds and ends that supply the architectural imagination are prevailing conceptions of the human body—its functions, perfectibility, and possibilities for pleasure and pain. Though architects of various periods have employed ideal proportions of the human body in conscious decisions about the structural proportions of monuments and buildings, this is not the only way, nor the most interesting way, in which the human body informs architecture. What is also meant by the body's relationship to architecture is the memory of body states that architecture evokes in the observer. These body states are recalled in the form of their psychological derivatives: moods, affects, and emotions. These derivatives initiate and qualify our aesthetic judgments about architecture.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Drama Review , Volume 12 , Issue 3: Architecture/Environment , Spring 1968 , pp. 105 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Drama Review 1968

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References

1 The psychoanalytic concepts that will will be employed further on in this study have been developed by René A. Spitz. Dr. Spitz has summarized many of his contributions in his book The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York: International Universities Press, 1965). The bibliography at the end of this book contains full references to a number of papers by Spitz that I have found especially useful, namely: “Diacritic and Coenesthetic Organizations” (1945), “The Primal Cavity: A Contribution to the Genesis of Perception and Its Role for Psychoanalytic Theory” (1955), No and Yes: On the Genesis of Human Communication (1957), “Life and the Dialogue” (1963), “The Derailment of Dialogue: Stimulus Overload, Action Cycles, and the Completion Gradient” (1964).

Also, I should like to acknowledge my gratitude to Mr. William Herman of The City College and to Professor Richard Schechner. Mr. Herman placed at my disposal his personal collection of technical materials and photographs of theatres. Professor Schechner has always been generous with the details of the rationale for his experimental activities in theatre, lately having to do with his revisions of traditional theatre spaces for play production.

2 Erving Goffman has produced a series of studies on the theatricality of everyday life. Theatre occurs just about everywhere from around bridge tables to hospital operating tables. But where all the world's a stage, Goffman uses the term “setting” for the space in which the action occurs. Architecturally, these settings are not theatres. Even an operating room that contains a special spectator space does not function as a theatre, because there is no stage. The space in which the operating team performs is a technologic area that does not induce regression in the spectators. An audience of medical students witnessing an operation possesses a didactic tension not discernible in a theatre audience.

3 The Visual Arts and Sciences,” Daedalus, Winter, 1965, p. 118.