ABSTRACT

As the symbolists, constructivists and surrealists of the historical avant-garde began to abandon traditional theatre spaces and embrace the more contingent locations of the theatrical and political ‘event’, the built environment of a performance became not only part of the event, but an event in and of itself.

Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of ‘performative architecture’.

‘Event’ was of immense significance to modernism’s revolutionary agenda, resisting realism and naturalism – and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. Event-Space analyzes a number of spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, both illuminating the history of avant-garde performance and inspiring contemporary approaches to performance space.

chapter |52 pages

Introduction

Event-space: a performance model for architecture

chapter 1|47 pages

Disciplining the bourgeois glory machine

chapter 2|59 pages

Absolute space

Universal landscapes

chapter 3|72 pages

Abstract space

Toward an architecture of alienation

chapter 4|76 pages

Abject space

Toward an architecture of cruelty

chapter |24 pages

Conclusion

Making architecture tremble