Scenarchitecture

Two parallel lives

"One time set design was architecture. Later it became imitation of architecture. Later on it became imitation of artificial architecture.
Then lost its head, became mad, and from that moment lived in an asylum. "

Gordon Craig, 1913

For centuries Architecture has been the art-science of "for ever", while Set design was "temporary".  
Looking to the past Architecture has played the role of Mother of the Arts, explained through a larger universal language, because was able to comprehend inside itself and between its space and dimensions, all the other Arts.
At the same time, Stage design has represented, in the course of history, the synthesis between theatre and actor, a visual and physical connection that "housed" scenic action into its core, containing it in its flow through the construction of a  "ephemeral" space precisely because limited in time.

Three aspects of Scenarchitecture as a change in the form of time.

A - Architecture becomes" temporary".

Over recent years Set design is immersing architecture into its drama: mutant buildings, scenic machines at the scale of building, or impalpable,  evanescent materials, created for a limited time existence: these realities are outlining a new course of the art-architecture relationship under the impetus of the image-era.  

B - Set design becomes "for ever".

Continue passages from one discipline to the other, it has generated a new methodology which has transformed  ideological concept of architectural language and typology into a referential identity, built on a visual contamination. The results of this process are "contaminated architectures” or “crystallized scenographies”, temporally immutable, that may also be understood as the result of design actions aimed  to crystallize an image in its three-dimensional representation (real or virtual), in a  form of building.

C - Set design invades the spaces of architecture.

Until now, the protagonist of set design has been the "internal" space of the theatre, the area which could not be fully represented in any other form, that could not be learned and lived without a direct experience.  
But since more than half a century the space of set design invades the buildings, the town, its streets and squares, wherever the work of man has limited the "empty" spaces, has created enclosed spaces.
ScenArchitecture lives when the theater comes out the theatre buildings to become "Architecture-theatre", "Urban-theatre"; in this case the Location, intended as a complex of space and social relationships, may not be considered only a simple "container" (Street theatre), nor reduced to subject/object of the scene (Location theatre or "Teatro dei Luoghi"). The Location must become a founding role, necessary other than unique, characterizing and bringing life to the substance of a  theatre text.
ScenArchitecture, in this sense, is defined as a series of design actions  to transform an architectural  and/or urban space to communicate a pre-existing content with which establish a dialectic relationship.

Performances

Videointerview on Mediarch.it

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