ABSTRACT
To speak of the unspeakable violence of space will necessarily be to disturb the terms of traditional discourse and make available new ways of talking. It is not simply a matter of addressing a different aspect of space. Rather it is a matter of finding a different form of address. This chapter takes the 2002 Moscow Theatre Siege as an early 21st-century catalyzing event when terror literally took the stage; returning to Friedrich Nietzsche's confrontational void through Georges Bataille's writings against architecture and Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Despite the buildings cited throughout the chapter, an architecture of cruelty is yet to come close to matching the more radical performances that have eventuated since Artaud's call for a Theatre of Cruelty, many of which still rely on the proscenium arch to construct their imagery. The chapter offers an alternative model resisting such incursions through a restorative architecture that adopts a new approach to performance space.
