REDLANDS COMMUNITY THEATER
date. Spring 2020
city. Redlands, California
typology. Theater
Redlands, California is known as a "Big Town, with a Small Town Feel." The residents of Redlands, rightfully so, take a significant amount of pride in their community. This community is an aspect that deserves to be showcased and incorporated into the Redlands Community Theater. The user interacts and engages with the building's slatted wood ribbons through way-finding, physical dwelling, and exterior guides. The engagements with these ribbons blur reality with fantasy, providing a pre-performance which allows the spectators to be the actors. A preparative theater experience by the Redlands community.
Redlands' diverse city and architecture are depicted in the collage above. The diagrams above provide a further understanding of the site concerning the location, lighting, program, materiality, vantage points, density, and circulation. The following diagrams give a contextual understanding of the Redlands Theater's placement within the site.
Moreover, the following diagrams enable a visual evolution of the concept. The slatted ribbons transform the user's experience as the typically linear form bends and then becomes engaged. This parallels a transition from reality to fantasy as a conventional exploration of a building is challenged with slants that fold into walls, floors, and an amphitheater, physical dwelling on the ribbons, circulation above, below, or on the ribbon, and skylights along the roof.
There are seven slatted ribbons strategically forming key aspects of the building. Some engage with the exterior forming the cafe or the grand staircase, masking the fly-tower and stage drop off on the exterior, and providing weather coverage for the lobby terrace. The others penetrate the interior of the building from the exterior serving as guides, planters, interior walls, visual indicators, and balcony seating within the proscenium theater.
These are the drawings of Redlands Theater, including the floor plans, elevations, section perspectives, and technical details of the theater's materiality, reverberation time, and ray tracings. The first floor houses the main public features of the theater with the lobby for the proscenium theater and box office, the gallery and secondary entrance, the cafe, and the black box theater. The space increases in privacy moving up to the second floor with the dance studios, classrooms, and balcony entrance into the proscenium theater. The basement accommodates the entire back of house for the proscenium theater with a strategic program of dressing rooms, a green room, rehearsal spaces, a costume workshop and a scenery workshop and storage. The elevations illustrate the engaging views on the exterior while the section perspective indicates the movement of the slatted ribbon throughout the interior. Finally, the theater materials are presented with details on how they decrease the reverberation time while maintaining the overall concept. The ray-tracing indicates good sight-lines as well as good sound-lines for the theater audience. Lastly, the reverberation time presents accurate calculations of how the materials affect sound details within the volume of the audience chamber.
