Educational theater has little to do with theater in the conventional sense. This is, first of all, school, creativity, student life and only then ready-made theatrical performances, as a result of all other creative processes that take place here. Therefore, the architect who designs such a building faces a difficult task - to create a container for the creative energy of future directors and actors, and maybe even stimulate it, but in no case be limited to a "box" that would suppress and oppress the beautiful impulses of the student soul …
The project of the educational theater "GITIS" was created back in 2002 in "Mosproekt-4". A building resembling a ship with a sharp bow and stern is inscribed in a triangular section adjacent to two busy streets - Garibaldi and Academician Pilyugin. The facade of the building facing the street is a blank wall with rare narrow rectangles of windows that look like a broken dotted line. On the reverse side, the building faces a small pedestrian street, which, according to the architects, should turn into an analogue of the Arbat. The dense shell on this side is interrupted by a completely transparent glass wall that reveals the interior space of the central atrium.
We live in the era of cars and super-scale, and modern architecture has to reckon with this. The human scale has long been no longer the defining value of an architectural structure, and the perception of the latter often comes from the windows of a moving car. The location of the GITIS theater at the intersection of two highways with a narrow pedestrian pavement has become a determining factor for the facades facing this side of the street. Streamlining, a pattern of colored panels of different shades of green, layering of individual elements of the facade and a clear horizontal direction - all this creates a feeling of the building's increasing speed along the street, echoing the movement of cars and incommensurate with the speed of pedestrians. For visitors to the educational theater, it may even be fun to try to jump into this ship "at full speed" using the opening of the main entrance, which looks as if it "accidentally" appeared in the plane of the blank facade.
On the back side, where a pedestrian street is organized, the building is being changed beyond recognition. The horizontal rhythm is replaced by the vertical one, which is set by the portico of colored columns, the stone inaccessibility is replaced by the transparency of glass of different shades, and the “imitation” of the car is replaced by the “humanized” architecture. The envelope of the building begins to play with the person in association: the volumes protruding from the facade appear chaotically, multi-colored columns are scattered along the facade, like crayons spilling out of a box. Such a space, saturated with images and echoing the creative direction of GITIS, should become a "hangout place" where students will gather in their free time and warm weather.
The interiors of the central atrium, the auditorium and the large rehearsal hall, made by the architectural studio of A. A. Asadov, directly echo the outer shell of the building. The bright color scheme of the walls, the juxtaposition of the vertical and horizontal rhythms of the railings, the occasional colored columns - all this refers to the decorative solutions of the facade. The most spectacular technique adopted by the architects for the interior was the narrow strips of the dull façade windows glowing in the dark, which were taken as the basis for the light design of the interior.
Inside, the educational theater building is divided into two zones by a central atrium with galleries on the second and third floors. On one side of the atrium there are rehearsal rooms, on the other there are an auditorium for 300 seats and a hotel for touring troupes, which is taken out in a separate volume from the building in the form of a bridge thrown over the pedestrian "Arbat".
Two large halls - an auditorium and a rehearsal one - flank the central atrium, creating deliberately opposed spaces. The rehearsal room is decorated with light wood inside, and it opens into the atrium with blank black walls. The auditorium is like an inverted space of a rehearsal hall, it is black on the inside and light on the outside. One of the authors of the project, Andrei Asadov, compares these two halls with caskets, in the “black box” a creative process takes place with an unpredictable result, and in the “wooden” one the result is solemnly revealed to the public.
Light plays a major role in the interior of the theater, making architectural forms live and play like actors. Narrow dashed lines of light, in the best traditions of Daniel Libeskind, cut through the floor of the first floor of the theater, outlining the chaotic trajectory of the movement of visitors. These lines of light erupt from the interior space, merging the interior with the public space around the building.
The lighting design touched not only the floor, but also the ceiling, walls and furniture built into the interior. So in the main atrium and the two symmetrical entrances flanking it, chandeliers in the form of luminous icicles hang from the ceiling, which, together with the lines on the floor, echo the horizontal-vertical rhythm of the gallery railings. The luminous "icicles" are suspended in such an order that they create the feeling of an incident light flux, clearly divided into separate light beams. In the central atrium, the stream of light falling from the ceiling finds its continuation in the media wall, which consists of metal blinds superimposed on narrow strips of mirrors with multi-colored illumination. The outer wall of the "black box" is decorated in a media style; this wall can be understood not only as the main expressive element of the interior, but also as a symbol of a glimpse of thought and the constant movement of creative energy. The vertical rhythm of the icicle lamps and the media wall interacts with the horizontal rhythm of the illumination of the galleries of the third tier and the twenty-six meter long bar.
Inside the "wooden box", which is the auditorium, the side walls are also decorated with light elements. The walls themselves are black rectangular panels superimposed on the main, the same black, wall. From under the rectangles, connected in lightning-like patterns, bluish light is knocked out, which outlines them around the perimeter and makes the main background of the wall a deep blue.
Belonging to the theater GITIS is indicated by the emblem of the institute, crowning the end of the hotel block, which overlooks and towers over the facade of the building along Garibaldi Street. According to Andrey Asadov, the emblem had to be slightly corrected, making it more graphic and enclosing it in a double triangular frame. The modernized emblem should correspond to the new modern building of the educational theater, made using the most modern theater technologies.
Indeed, the new theater "GITIS" is an educational building for unusual students who learn to create a creative process and be included in it. Architecturally, the building reflects this purpose very accurately. The students who came to the opening of the theater were pleasantly surprised by its space. It was a discovery for them that student theater can be so bright, imaginative, in tune with their creative impulses. Students, not us, should be critics of this building, because they almost live in this educational theater.
