The city already has one large theater - Upper Austria, the capital of which is Linz: until now, both musical and dramatic performances have been staged there. But since 1984, the townspeople have wanted to build a separate building for opera, ballet and musicals. Several construction sites and architectural projects changed, until in 2006 Briton Terry Pawson won a pan-European competition.
For the sake of his project, an important city highway was even moved so that it would not separate the new theater from the nearby Volksgarten park (the tram line in this place was left the same, only hiding it underground). As a result, a solemn composition arose quite in the spirit of theaters, if not the 19th century, then the middle of the 20th century. The terrace square leads from the park to the theater's front entrance, where spectators climb a wide staircase, and the main facade is decorated with thin profiles reminiscent of the rhythm of classical buildings.
If the foyer faces the transparent facade and the park behind it, the workshops and utility rooms are grouped in the opposite part of the building, bordering the railway tracks. Between them is a horseshoe-shaped main hall for 1000 spectators, where all seats are located no further than 27 meters from the stage, and an experimental studio hall in the basement. Among the technical innovations is an automatic stage set storage system, which was first used in theater practice (it was originally developed for airports), and there is also a rotating stage 32 m in diameter., respectively.
For Linz, a city with less than 200,000 inhabitants, the new theater, worth 15 million euros, is a serious acquisition, and it will open on a grand scale. The first performance will be the world premiere of Philip Glass's opera Traces of the Lost, based on a play by Peter Handke.
N. F.
