Canvas
The Age
Wednesday June 17, 2009
A foyer is not only for meeting and greeting, but for talking, exchanging views and for the forgotten art of promenading.THERE'S a small hotel in Innsbruck where I stayed a few years ago. At least I think it was a hotel: it was so fussily overdesigned, with tense, angular furniture in contradictory colours, that it could have been an airport lounge crossed with a gallery space. In my room, which miraculously had a bed parallel to the floor and not on a 45-degree slant, the wardrobe had a sliding door that, despite my best efforts, didn't quite close. I rang reception.MS: "Please, could someone come up and fix my wardrobe door. It doesn't close."Reception: "Ah. It's not meant to."MS: "Er, what?"Reception: "You see, the architect insisted."No doubt - I didn't say this - the same architect ensured the bathplug didn't quite fit or the desk by the window had just enough wobble to drive one mad rather than insane.The cupboard door remained seven-eighths closed, and designer conceit remained inviolate.I thought of this the other night as I queued across the foyer of one of our newer public performing-arts institutions, waiting to collect my coat. The line stretched diagonally, effectively forming a human wall, thus segregating the audience and leading to perplexity and challenge on the part of those on one side trying to get to the other. It is a large space, which no doubt looked wonderful in one of those computer images speckled with a few silhouettes representing the public. But that is theory; this was practice, and, to all practical purposes, it seems no one thought this foyer might be heavily populated by flesh-and-blood people whose objectives were not always the same.I am in no doubt that the same slippage betwixt drawing board and down-to-earth reality has occurred more than once in grand cultural designs. For example, the enormous Kerimaki church in Finland was rumoured to be the result of a miscalculation between the architect, who worked in centimetres, and the builders, who worked in inches. Just as well it wasn't the other way around: Finns are not natural Lilliputians. But that is a church, not a theatre or concert hall, and performing spaces have different requirements from worshipping ones.Any cultural space begins with the foyer, and it is vital to establish purpose and mood before a speech is spoken or trumpet sounded. A foyer is not only for meeting and greeting, but for talking, exchanging views and for the forgotten art of promenading - still observed at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, and the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, whose grand spaces were built with that in mind.Foyers are also useful for overhearing some extraordinary conversations. Once, in the interval of Verdi's Don Carlos in Edinburgh, I heard one worthy woman of Scotland say to her friend: "Well, I wouldn't let that Princess Eboli clean my hoose!"The other night only confirmed to me that the perfect foyer is harder to achieve than one might think. In fact, the number of good foyers is eclipsed by the not-so-good and the downright terrible. For example, the Sydney Opera House, which was built more or less according to plan, has the coldest foyer spaces of any building I know, in climatic and aesthetic terms. If you happen to have a thing for pre-stressed concrete, floor and stair surfaces harder than permafrost and a hostile, combative acoustic, this is your place. I've always thought it would make an excellent railway station.Melbourne has some fine foyers, but most of them are in theatres - for example, upstairs at the Princess and Her Majesty's theatres. Elsewhere, it's a mixed collection. For example, there's the main one of the Arts Centre, even if its subterranean, red-carpeted acreage is more reminiscent of a below-decks saloon on the Lusitania. The curving foyers of the State Theatre induce intimacy at the same time as helplessness (have you ever tried to find anyone there?); while the Playhouse's square space has the advantage of an entrance-making, people-spotting staircase, which is as useful for choreographed descent as it is for hasty ascent. Hamer Hall's foyers, however, manage to be capacious and pokey, as well as prime examples of 1970s garishness, which combine the allure of the bordello with the gold-leaf glister of the casino and the functionality of a brash, Bloomingdale-like escalator.I have yet to try the foyer of the MTC's new Sumner Theatre, but it looked warm and inviting when I passed by the other night on the way to the Melbourne Recital Centre. The MRC has its problems, and it will be good when it sorts out its catering and licensing worries, and has something more to offer its audiences in hospitality terms.Did I mention that good coffee, fine wine and presentable food are also essential foyer requirements? At least architects don't design ribbon sandwiches or asparagus rolls.
© 2009 The Age
