Design Studio 13 Master of Architecture (MArch RIBA Part 2)

TUTORS: Andrei Martin & Andrew Yau

New Spatialities: The National Theatre as Urban Spectacle

DS13 operates as an applied think tank, performing cultural analysis and design research. Central to the studio is the continual re-conceptualisation of established architectural typologies.

Through the conceit of a speculative extension to the National Theatre, we interrogated the limits of theatre as architectural form, recasting it as civic apparatus, performative instrument and mutable actor within the city.

ARCHITECTURE AS PERFORMANCE

Theatre has never been confined to the stage; it spills into streets, foyers and landscapes, often thriving where architecture loosens its grip. The challenge was to ask: how can a building not only house performance but itself perform? Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre provided both context and provocation: a contested yet enduring civic monument whose terraces and internal routes already choreograph the movement of bodies, scripting a drama before any play begins. Our task was to radicalise this condition; reconceptualising the theatre as platform, promenade and performative surface – an active agent repositioned from backdrop to actor and mutable host for collective spectacle.

TOWARDS A NEW DRAMATURGY OF SPACE

Our extensions operated as interlocutors rather than appendages, unsettling typological certainty while intensifying spatial potential. Performance was dispersed beyond auditoria into foyers, terraces, staircases and voids, each becoming a stage for civic assembly. Boundaries between performer and spectator, spectacle and city, were deliberately dissolved, converting circulation and occupation into a dramaturgy of public space.

MATERIAL AND ECOLOGICAL AGENCY

Where the theatre of the 1970s was defined by permanence, today’s equivalent must engage ephemerality, ecology and reuse. Proposals operated as ecological apparata, mobilising form, matter and atmosphere as agents within an expanded urban dramaturgy. The extension became an operative ecology – porous to city, river and climate – mediating between cultural production and environmental contingency.

ESTRANGEMENT AND MEMORY

From the tension between monumental institution and democratic stage, a ‘National’ Theatre emerged. Projects engaged this field of memory without deferring to or erasing it, instead staging a dialogue through estrangement.