Jan Lazardzig / Bri Newesely / Kerstin Wittmann-Englert / Franziska Ritter / Halvard Schommartz / Marie-Charlott Schube (eds.)

17 × 24 cm, 304 pages, 80 colour illustrations ISBN 978-3-98612-083-2

As public buildings, theatres are a prominent arena for ideological conflicts, social issues and societal representations. This book is the first to examine 20th-century theatre architecture as an object of knowledge, asking how our knowledge of theatre architecture and stage technology was produced, disseminated and shaped. The authors approach the topic using various objects and discourses, from architectural education and cultural heritage to architectural photography. 
Theatre construction knowledge has a social, institutional and infrastructural context.
For the interdisciplinary DFG research project ‘Theatre Building Knowledge’, the results of which are presented in this volume, such a situational context of knowledge is given in two senses: on the one hand, through the perspective of theatre building as an ‘epistemic object’, i.e. an object towards which a specific desire for knowledge or insight is directed. On the other hand, through the collection context itself, in which the materials and media are located.

A central focus of the project is the theatre construction collection at the Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Berlin (see also BTR Special Edition 2018). It represents a collection of objects and knowledge relating to theatre construction and stage technology that is probably unique in the world and today comprises materials from the 1920s to the 1980s on over 500 theatre buildings in Germany, Austria, France, Slovenia, Poland, Czechia and Russia. In three main layers of holdings with a total of over 5,000 objects, the collection documents the innovations in theatre construction of the 1920s and 1930s, shows the new construction and renovation measures
during the Nazi era, and provides comprehensive insight into the architectural plans of West German post-war modernism. At the same time, it provides information about the standardisation and institutionalisation of  theatre construction knowledge in the course of the 20th century.
A central part of the TU Berlin’s theatre construction collection originates from a documentation project commissioned by Albert Speer in 1939 in his capacity as “General Building Inspector for
the Reich Capital Berlin” (GBI): The plan was to produce a comprehensive handbook entitled ‘Das Deutsche Theater’ (The German Theatre).

By 1943, some 375 theatre buildings in the German Reich had been photographed and recorded using a questionnaire. Speer commissioned Berlin-based building researcher Theodor von Lüpke (1873–1961) and a team of architects, draughtsmen and an art historian to carry out this publication project. Work on the handbook was discontinued in 1944 shortly before completion, and the work remained unpublished.

The second part of this book is devoted to individual objects from the TU Berlin’s theatre architecture collection. In twenty-one individual analyses, epistemic aspects are examined, always based on the materiality and mediality of the objects. The photograph on the cover of this book also comes from the theatre architecture collection. It is a photograph of the auditorium of the “Gautheater Westmark‘ in Saarbrücken (architect: Paul Baumgarten), built between 1936 and 1938, taken by photographer Emil Leitner for the handbook ’Das Deutsche Theater‘ (The German Theatre). The view falls diagonally through the ’Führer’s box” onto the stage portal. The photograph, mounted on cardboard and marked with pencil marks in preparation for printing, thus bears witness in several ways to the appropriation and ideological transformation of traditional theatre building forms under National Socialism.
This book focuses on the political implications of epistemic shifts and transformations in theatre architecture knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries.