MUMMERS THEATER OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA
ON ORGANIZATION AND ORDER
[I am reminded] of Louis Kahn's statement that at a certain point in the design and development of a building, the building turns back on the architect and determines how it wants to be finished. It becomes a living element, a personified partner in the design process.
In the case of the Oklahoma [Mummers] Theatre, the organization is not compositional in the conventional sense, but has an order that is adopted from the electronic organization of elements.
The basis is the chassis, and the components and sub-components are attached to them, which of course are serving elements for the major components. Then there is the harnessing and the communications system, which are for circulation. This freed me in my thinking, just by its pure terminology, to organize the building. I think that's unique and hope it's original in the sense of going into an organization that is adopted from another field of endeavor. Otherwise there is no organization there, and it looks like chaos. I was very proud to have it look like chaos!
You pass between certain forms that relate to each other and in turn to the organization - one on the left and one on the right relate to the organization, so it's a tripartite organization with three different centers of order.
- John M Johansen interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist
When invited by Oklahoma City Arts Council Director James Tolbert (above) to revisit the building in 2008 and attend the Oklahoma City Festival of Arts Reception, held each year in the Mummers [Stage Center] Theater, then-92 year-old Johansen flew from New York to Oklahoma City by himself to participate in the event. The party (below), held throughout the vibrant Mummers Theater complex, was attended by over 1000 arts and architecture enthusiasts (above left).
John M Johansen ushered in a new era of architecture in 1970 in Oklahoma City with his radical Mummer’s (Stage Center) Theatre. Johansen, who received the prestigious American Institute of Architects Honors Award for his design, incorporated two major influences in his design - brutalism and systems theory - to create one of his most successful projects.
My purpose was to excite, intrigue, tempt, and entrap. In the Mummers Theater, theater goers are drawn into a building as stage set and feel themselves actors among professionals on the stage itself, in a total, combined performance. As I like to make the analogy, such buildings are like artful, subtle women who, offering love, do not give themselves, but ask to be taken.
- John M Johansen FAIA
New Organizing Ideas
This new position is one which is concerned not with gestural form and with masterworks of architecture, but rather with processes, with action, with behavioral patterns, and how most simply all these may be expressed. This new position does not attempt to define a new architecture, but settles for something more humble yet fundamental, expressed by Peter Cook simply as new ' organizing ideas' or ' ordering devices.' The idea or device will derive from motivating processes-processes of newly recognized societal behavior, and of highly industrialized building techniques, Advocates of this position, Archigram and the Metabolists, will strive to reconcile these now more carefully examined living patterns with new technology. ‘ Architecture as we know it ’ is less and less a determinant in the organization of our buildings, of building complexes, or of cities. It is no longer effective in its solutions, nor even compelling in its esthetic expression. Formalism, centrality, ordered sequence, and the design of isolated unrelated buildings cannot deal with the demands that the urban problems are now making upon the profession. - John M Johansen
Disdain for Establishment Modern
Johansen comments on the Moholy-Nagy article, "The Mummers Theater: A Fragment, Not a Building" (1968):
[This building] conveys the rebellious spirit I experienced at that time, which further encouraged me to trust and rely upon my own originality in designs of buildings to follow. The Beaux Arts is still very much with us. Nearly all the major buildings currently designed and built in the United States, and each year honored by our profession, are conceived according to those standards and values which we thought we had discarded after the architectural revolution of the 1920s and 1930s. Whether classically geometric or romantically amorphous, most of the work by architects, including myself, over the past ten years has been faithful to that old tradition which would have us concern ourselves with the 'tasteful arrangement of compositional elements.' The 'form giving' period is waning. Although one can still make convincing distinctions between the forms of neo-classicists like Johnson, Yamasaki, Stone, or SOM, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the more picturesque designers like Kahn, Rudolph, Giurgola, Venturi, or myself, there is really very little difference between them all; we have all come from the same bag, when our work is seen from the vantage point of a totally new formative position now being established.
Lebbeus Woods and Haresh Lalvani comment on John M Johansen as architectural innovator
