Wright's Baghdad opera house and Gammage Auditorium: in search of regional modernity

[FIGURE 34 OMITTED]

The multipurpose program yielded diverse design criteria not only for the room's acoustics but also for the stage. The performance of opera, musical comedy, and dance called for an orchestra pit for thirty-five to one hundred musicians, yet such a pit would become an undesirable barrier between dramatic performers and their audiences. The solution was to provide a movable hydraulically powered floor at the stage's front. This could be lowered for an orchestra pit; raised to match the floor level just in front of the stage, where it could support three rows of seating; or raised further to the stage's level, increasing its frontal floor area. Similarly, drama, opera, and ballet all required a stage house with a capacious fly tower above and operating wings on either side, whereas for music, these large volumes around the stage had to be blocked off to keep the acoustic energy directed toward the audience. Izenour achieved this flexibility by designing the stage enclosure, or shell, which Knudsen stressed was "as important for good acoustics as is the design of the audience area." He could "not overemphasize the importance of considering the shell as an integral and indispensable part of the acoustical design of the Auditorium. It is the prime requirement for converting a theater-opera house into a concert hall." (120) Wright's plans for ASU's auditorium had incorporated a revolving stage, precluding a fixed shell. Once Taliesin Associated Architects had replanned the stage as fixed, Izenour designed a shell consisting of six telescoping squared arches (Fig. 35). When extended forward, the shell could frame a 120-piece full symphony orchestra, a 300-member chorus, and a pipe organ. Peters explained, "The orchestra shell, automatically telescopic, becomes, when ... extended, an organic part of the main auditorium, virtually extending the walls, ceiling and volumetric space of the house to the stage itself and making one great room." (121)

The idea of "one great room," rooted in part in the Chicago Auditorium, is consistent with Wright's emphasis on the shaping of space as the principal idea of his architecture, an idea that he had articulated consistently in his writings from the 1920s. Speaking to the Iraqi engineers in 1957, he had said:

    Lao-tse declared the reality of a building did not consist in the
    walls and roof but in the space within to be lived in. Well, now,
    there you have the life of the spirit as reality rather than the
    things that go to make up what we call materialism. That has entered
    into architecture now. That interior sense of life is really true of
    organic architecture. (122)

At Gammage Auditorium's dedication in September 1964, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright noted that her husband was fond of quoting the phrase from Lao-tse, adding, "I feel that this building is a tremendous expression of that thought. In this space in which we all are now, we seem to be contented even if nothing were happening in it. This space seems to have intelligence of its own, integrity of its own, a soul of its own." (123) As viewed across its breadth, Gammage does have a powerful spatial form even when empty (Fig. 36), like the larger Chicago Auditorium (Fig. 37). The Chicago Auditorium has a volumetric shell of vertically concave elliptical ceiling arches and, as in the main gallery front, horizontal elliptical curves. In Gammage, the horizontally concave curvature of the seating levels has its complement in the ceiling panels' convex curvatures relative to the stage. Here, more so than in Chicago's Auditorium, Gammage features enormous clear spans for its main and upper balconies. These spans help to unify the space, as do unbroken rows of continental seating at all levels. The architects even specified that plastered surfaces were to have no joint markings that would visually interrupt their continuity. (124) Like its Chicago predecessor, Gammage displays a harmony of seamless curving lines that signify the modernist ideal of visual form following acoustic function. Wright's last public building thus embodies an idea of architecture as space found in Adler and Sullivan's hall at the start of his career.