ADS10 continues to explore the idea of a Savage Architecture; an architecture that is not mere shelter and comfort, nor display and reproduction of wealth, but rather assumed as the material and symbolic basis of mankind’s necessity to come together and engage in collective rituals.
This year we focus on theatres as forms of constructing the political meaning of the city. At the origins of the theatre lies mankind’s ancestral need to visualise and rationalise the world of imagination, connecting the physical and the spiritual realms. This link is evoked and translated by performing dances or choreographed movements that make understandable the foundations of collective life.As such, the theatre is not just a space for performances, but rather a form of construction and representation of a community, which uses sacred, ludic or dramatic representation of conflicts as didactic tools to build social practises.
To challenge the canonical understanding of theatres as cultural institutions or programs of entertainment, the students are called to identify, document and collaborate emerging collective subjects in the city, with the ambition of designing architectures that can represent their collective needs and desires in the public sphere. Understanding the space of performance as a space of political action, rather than as a genre of leisure that can just reinstate existing social relationships, we are imagining theatres of common life that can stage the savage power of being human together.
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Image: Lina Bo Bardi, SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo, 1977-86.