Oklahoma: the name evokes devastating bombs and musical theatre, and now the state capital’s government has contrived to combine the two by ploughing ahead with its outrageous plan to demolish the city’s Stage Center.

Originally known as the Mummer’s Theater, this remarkable building was designed by John Johansen – who was taught by Gropius at Harvard and was, along with Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer, one of the ‘Harvard Five’. It was completed in 1970, to mingled applause and disapprobation (the latter emanating mostly from confused locals). If we’re going to play the name game you could say that, like James Stirling’s contemporaneous ‘red buildings’, it straddles the Brutalist and High-Tech idioms.

Its three béton brut pavilions contain stages of various sizes. These are linked by brightly painted corrugated iron catwalks and surmounted by a network of external services housed in metal boxes and chutes. It looks like an oil refinery converted into a fun house, and is the amiable transatlantic cousin of the rather stiffer Hayward Gallery/Queen Elizabeth Hall complex, which was completed just a couple of years earlier.

The Mummers Theater Plan

Like the South Bank buildings it follows a certain Modernist trajectory away from the building as object: the radically decentralised and asymmetric plan does away with hierarchy, and there is no discernible facade. Like many 1960s avant-gardists, Johansen set out along the path indicated by Hannes Meyer’s definition of architecture as pure organisation, but he doesn’t quite go to the apolitical extremes of Archigram’s banal cybernetics worship (although Johansen also claimed to be inspired by circuitry, the industrial vocabulary used here seems a kind of prophylactic against techno-whimsy).

Campaigners have been struggling for years to save the building, but the fact is it was jinxed from the start. Built to house a local theatre group led by Mack Scism called the Mummers, the primary funding for the project came from the Ford Foundation. Another major donor was local businessman John Kirkpatrick, but as soon as the building opened he threatened to withdraw his $178,000 gift unless the Mummers replaced their board with another of his own choice....Continue Reading

> via The Architectural Review