Renovation
A $30-million renovation of the Taper led by the Los Angeles firm Rios Clementi Hale Studios began in July 2007 after the 2006/2007 season. The theater reopened on August 30, 2008 for the first preview of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves.
The Taper, as originally designed, was a case study in what happens when a theater is built without a tenant in mind. Having the auditorium into a circular building left a tiny backstage and only a thin, curved hallway for a lobby.
The renovation updated nearly everything that was not concrete and did not disrupt the building’s circular shape. To create a larger main lobby, the designers shrank the ticket booth and moved the bathrooms below ground, taking out 30 parking spaces and created a stylized lounge with gold, curved couches and mosaics of mirrored tiles that fit the era in which the building was designed. The theater seats are wider and total capacity was reduced from 745 to 739. The entrance was modified to be on grade with the plaza and added an elevator, one of several changes to increase the accessibility of the theater.
The original theater also had very few women's bathrooms opening with four women's stalls for a 750-seat hall. The renovation increased the number of stalls to 16. Backstage, changes included removing an outdated stage "treadmill", created a modern lighting grid, cleared out old air-conditioning equipment to allow space for a wardrobe room and widened the load-in door to 6 feet by 9 feet.
The auditorium was renamed the Amelia Taper Auditorium after a $2 million gift from the S. Mark Taper Foundation.
Read more about this topic: Mark Taper Forum
Famous quotes containing the word renovation:
“Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)