Chameleon Theatre - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2001 by Peter Blundell Jones

Rotterdam's new Luxor Theatre is a rich internal landscape of interacting layers that combines contingencies of site with the rituals of theatre going.

Rotterdam is redeveloping its docklands area just south of the centre across the River Maas, a branch of the Rhine, and the city authorities saw the need to inject an element of culture into the inevitable development of offices, shops and flats. To this end, they set aside a crucial corner site to establish a new branch of the successful Luxor Theatre, whose original house (dating from the 1920s) remains in the city centre.

For the design of the building, an invited architectural competition was held in 1996 featuring such luminaries as Herman Hertzberger, Rem Koolhaas and Kees Christiaanse, but Bolles + Wilson took first prize and has built its scheme without substantial changes. It already knew the area well, as it had previously won (and built) a competition for the rehabilitation of the adjacent quayside, including the control tower for the Erasmus Bridge, which opens for passing ships. It was its handling of the context that gave it the edge in this competition. Both theatre and earlier quayside scheme show great skill in manipulating a difficult part of the city that involves huge contrasts of scale.

Sited at the crossroads just south of the Erasmus Bridge, the theatre plays a major role in creating the bridgehead. Its 36m-high fly-tower commands the junction and announces its presence to the captive traffic on the bridge with vast graphic displays and lettering in huge type. The theatre has a similar bulk and presence in the opposite direction, as its south side presents long views across the Rhine harbour. To the east, its official side fronts the bridge road with a series of offices, dressing rooms and an artists' entrance.

In plan, the building absorbs the 105[degrees] angle of the dock corner: the axis of stage and auditorium is normal to the road, and the curving foyer adopts the orientation of the quay to the south. On its less formal side, the building is shaped by the path of the trucks that deliver scenery to the stage door. These enter the building by a ramp at its western corner, turn in a projecting tongue of space at the southern corner and reverse into a loading bay beside the stage. [1]

In a piece of neat coincidental design, the movement of the foyer above follows the same path, with a stepped pedestrian ramp over the truck ramp and the largest bar with southward view over the loading area. The roof of the truck's turning space becomes a dramatic paved terrace to the foyer that juts out over the water. Most people will not notice that the promenade through the foyers follows the progress and direction of the ramp below, but it means all major patterns of movement are combined, swinging around anticlockwise. This reinforces a notion, suggested by the plan form, that the whole building is encompassed by a single spiralling wall that opens snail-like at the entrance and culminates in the stage. In a nice piece of expressive functionalism, the vehicle ramp appears on south and west sides as a heavy duty structure such as a girder bridge.

Although the seven- to eight-storey building may look modest from a distance, and has to make bold announcements to the wider world with three-storey-high letters, the immediate approach and entrance needed to be more intimate. There was also the oppressive problem of two crossing, six-lane highways. To bring the scale down, Bolles + Wilson created a kind of semi entrance court contained by a projecting flank wall. The north-facing side contains box offices, the east-facing one the battery of doors that lead to the main foyer, with large windows above so you can look out. The building gathers its crowd effortlessly and there is space enough for it to disperse easily and quickly after the show.

Site space for the whole building was rather tight, prompting an early decision to raise the auditorium off the ground, tucking the first foyer level beneath it. Members of the audience therefore turn the first corner to confront the underbelly of the hall and its various canted structural supports. Depositing their coats at the counter to the left, they turn to start on one of the three batteries of stairs rising to higher levels, going to left or right depending on destination. As they rise through the building, each new stair invites them to the next stage of the promenade until they find the appropriate level for their seat. All this is very Scharounian in principle and effect. [2] Unprecedented, however, is the delightful sloping route along the south edge on top of the lorry ramp, which is treated as a series of very long steps and lit by horizontal, slit windows close to the floor. It winds irresistibly round, gathering more stair connections as it goes, and culminates in a double-level bar and restaur ant with magnificent views over the Rhine dock. Further stairs within this volume lead to an upper bar level and to a whole additional foyer leading back the other way to another bar above the entrance.