Grafton Architects: Solstice Arts Center and the Problem of Theater Design

The traditional theater stagehouse, with its flies, catwalks, upstage, backdrops, battens, wings and traps certainly poses an aesthetic and formal issue for architects, often characterized typologically by a tall, dark, and oftentimes awkward volume shoved out of the top of the building.

The design for this project approaches the problem of the theater box building type in two ways. First, it utilizes the topography of the site to carve and nestle its theater into the ground. And second, it implies a slick rendered volume to complete the edges of the program below, which will house a future courthouse for this small town.

The result is astonishing: on approaching the building at night, the hovering black volume is nearly imperceptible — suggesting an almost one-story building — as the planar soffit of the covered exterior plaza gleams the reflection of the adjacent contrasting glass entrance volume. The user then descends downward into the almost subterrain theater space.