Towards a historiography of western modern and contemporary theatre architecture

Abstract

An accurate exam on the western history of theatre architecture in the modern and contemporary period proves the almost complete absence of critical works requiring an urgent need for historiographic studies that expands research in this area. Architectural historians in the 20th and 21st centuries do not devote themselves to the study of the theatrical building ― an object of canonical treatises in the Renaissance and the 17th century. Grounded in Michel de Certeau's historiographic concepts, this article aims, above all, to analyze methodological and ideological processes applied by three architecture historians and three theater theorists who have addressed the theme in some way, and under what different theoretical approaches, in the sense of arguing that the historiography of architecture for the modern and contemporary performing arts is practiced in contemporary times by theater theorists with greater intensity than by architectural historians.