(continued)

The Building as Theater Set

The facility has helped celebrate life in the past. It was the home office and print center for Esquire magazine and included an office for Hugh Hefner before he started his own celebration. It was even the printing facility for early editions of Playboy.

The building includes a dramatic three-story space with a curving wall that turns into the roof and is enclosed with three walls of windows to provide the right combination of light and space for creating billboard art. And it has provided the environment for numerous workers to support their families and their aspirations.

But Zimmerman asked the facility to do more, and it willingly obliged.

The loading dock door was never put to better use than as the opening curtain, which raised with a rattle to reveal a Victorian bedroom scene awash with a misty dim light evoking a faded photograph.

When forklifts used to drive pallets of paper across the field-sized warehouse, there was never a field of yellow flowers so beautiful that a painter agonized over where to place his easel until his muse reached down to him from overhead trusses. However many times the warehouse brought us goods or information, it never served better than in manifesting such a painstaking desire for the purity of art.

At no time has the small storage space held anything as valuable as the presentation of man's feelings of impenetrable isolation and confinement. Crowded in the small room to observe Swann in his room, the audience physically shared the character's discomfort.

With the totally different use of a different tiny space, Zimmerman makes us feel the intimate passion of a man's adoration for his sleeping lover in a scene of veneration the building has surely never witnessed before.

And for all of the billboard ads painted and photographed for reproduction in that tall, curving roof space, the room has never been used as creatively as at the conclusion of the play.

Swann's three-story tall shadow symbolizing his disunity from himself painstakingly becomes smaller and smaller as he walks away from the audience to the successful end of his difficult journey of understanding. Finally man and shadow are one with each other at the end of the room.

The play ended. There was no applause. None was expected, nor desired. We simply move on to the next scene of our own struggle. The building moves on to its next use. But we all have sensed a highlight.

The Building as Performer

We all have highlights. Composers have their quintessential score, artists have their culminating piece, women grow more beautiful with age, but they have an inexplicable beauty on their wedding day and when they give birth. Architects have their best buildings.

And buildings have their best days.

However, it is not the physical beauty of the building that provides its peak. A building is rarely at its best on opening day. What makes a building beautiful is the fulfillment of its architectural program. Of course when you have a physically beautiful building with a great program running in it you have an ultimate situation:

Thanksgiving dinner at Fallingwater. The Baltimore Orioles winning the World Series on a warm fall day in Camden Yard Stadium. Life-saving research being conducted at the Salk Institute. But most buildings aren't great. They are mostly only fair-to-middling. Yet, they too have their peaks.

Tenement slums enjoy raucous weddings, faceless suburban tract homes have joyous reunions, and horrible modern office building knock-offs house tremendous business successes.

And one day many years from now, the architecturally insignificant conglomeration of buildings on Ravenswood in Chicago will be sitting around having a cup of tea. When it dips a piece of French bread into the tea, it will remember a summer when its belly was lit from the inside with the passion of a theatrical masterpiece, and it will happily know it was never more beautiful than when it was a dance called "Eleven Rooms of Proust."

ArchitectureWeek Correspondent Michael J. Bordenaro is an independent writer and architecture marketing consultant based in Chicago. He was the Singapore Correspondent for Electronic Business Asia and was an associate editor with Building Design & Construction.

The play opened with the noisy raising of a loading dock door to reveal a haunting view of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Photo: Liz Lauren Dreamlike scenes of early 20th century France aristocracy in a raw environment exposed the troubled core of the times and the beauty of the manufacturing space. Photo: Liz Lauren Transforming a warehouse space into a field of flowers imbued the facility with a previously unrealized beauty. Photo: Liz Lauren At no time has the small storage space held anything as valuable as the presentation of man's feelings of impenetrable isolation and confinement. Photo: Liz Lauren Wrought with intriguing ambiguity, stunning metaphorical imagery, psychological insinuation and distorted links of time and memory, the play demanded a higher architectural program from the building. Photo: Liz Lauren At the same time as portraying France aristocracy, the production instilled an awesome architectural beauty in the working class building. Photo: Liz Lauren   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.