Saturday, January 19, 2013

A "Camden Yards" Approach To New Theaters?

I was down in Alexandria, Virginia today for an audition and, on my way down and back, noticed a lot of new commercial and residential development in Northern Virginia that was designed in a deliberately "retro" fashion.  Think townhouses that look like nineteenth-century brownstones, and office buildings in brick and stone with exterior ornamentation.

This, of course, has been something of a trend over the past few decades--a reaction, in part, to the overly-severe influences of Bauhaus-Brutalist architecture on the look of modern cityscapes.  It's another reflection of the fact that human progress, while upward, moves in a circular spiral rather than in a straight line, often revisiting old ideas and concerns repeatedly.  Or, as Sherlock Holmes once said, using another circular metaphor, the wheel turns and the same spokes come up.

This got me thinking about a prominent contribution to today's "retro" trend in architecture:  Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles, which had its 20th-anniversary season in 2012.  No one expected Oriole Park to launch a new trend in ballpark architecture, and I doubt that many people would think of Baltimore as a launching pad for a new trend in architecture.  But, as it turned out, the Orioles' new-old stadium became the prototype for a new generation of baseball ballparks, one that blended traditional architecture with modern amenities.

And thinking about Oriole Park, in turn, informed my reaction to this.

I'm thrilled that the Keegan in DC, like Everyman Theatre here in Baltimore, is recycling an older structure along with its history and architecture.  If anything, I wish that more theatre companies (and performing arts groups generally) would take advantage of the tremendous surplus of not only older theatres, but older buildings generally, to re-use them as performances spaces.  Doing so would go a long way to preserving and promoting the best of both performance art and architecture.  It would have enormous economic advantages for the tenants, in savings on the cost of owning their own real estate, and for the surrounding neighborhoods, in spurring the growth and development of local businesses.  And the "recycling" of existing structures has obvious environmental advantages as well.

I've long been an advocate of reshaping public policy to promote the restoration and re-use of older theaters as performance spaces.  A good way to start would be here in Baltimore, by reclassifying existing tavern liquor licenses as cabaret licenses, and selling them to property owners who would re-use old theaters and other existing structures as cabarets, with music and perhaps other forms of entertainment as well.  There should be other forms of public incentives as well:  grants, tax credits, zoning variances and so forth.  Some of this exists already, but it needs to be expanded at least a thousandfold.  The economic impact would far exceed the cost.

So, how about it?  Can I get a second for my "Camden Yards" approach?  I hope so.  And, in doing so, I hope that we can go even farther than we've gone in recapturing the glories of a supposedly bygone era.

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