The theater that never was
Max Reinhardt Theatre, proposed, New York City
1927-1929
Joseph Urban, Architect
Joseph Urban (1872-1933) c. 1915, architect, illustrator, and scenic designer
Joseph Urban cut his artistic teeth in fin-de-siecle Vienna, amid the city’s neo-baroque splendor and a maelstrom of artistic activity. He would be influenced by symbolism, art nouveau, the Vienna Secession, and the first stirrings of modernism in the capital. In New York, he would design a showroom for the display and sale of Wiener Werkstatte objects. He would serve as principal scenic designer for both the Metropolitan Opera and the Ziegfeld Follies. In his time, he was so famous that, when he checked into a hospital during his illness in the early 1930s, he would use an assumed name.
Among Urban’s unrealized projects, a new home for the Metropolitan Opera and a theater for director and impresario Max Reinhardt offered tantalizing glimpses of artistic and theatrical possibility. Due to the Depression, his project for Reinhardt’s theater never came to fruition. However, another theater project, the Ziegfeld Theatre (1927) in Manhattan, showed his unconventional design concepts, which included surrounding the audience with a painted environment, the world’s largest mural. His Reinhardt Theatre would have featured the world’s tallest proscenium, and would have expanded the stage area around the sides of the auditorium, merging audience and actors.
Few of Urban’s architectural works remain today. His archives, housed at Columbia University, help to preserve the artistic genius of a designer and artist who had become little-known. The Joseph Urban Collection online showcases and provides a guide to this collection.
Urban straddled two worlds: architecture and theater. On the one hand, there was an innate theatricality to Urban’s architecture – theatrical in the sense of being dramatic and playful, and theatrically conceived as virtual stage settings in which real people are characters moving through carefully designed spaces.
Aronson, Arnold, “Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban.”
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/architectOfDreams/text.html#theater
Joseph Urban Archives, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/
For theater buildings in New York, wedged into narrow spots on crowded streets, Urban felt there was a particular challenge that could be met through designing the public face of the building “around the electric light sign and incidentally the fire–escape and the marquee.” The proposed Max Reinhardt Theatre… intended for the productions of the innovative German director but unfortunately never built, was perhaps the epitome of this philosophy. The facade was to be covered in a skin of Vitrolite, “a gleaming black glass.” Cutting horizontally across this surface was to be a pyramid of six fire escapes outlined in gold metal–work with white panels that would contain advertising signs, while the center of the façade would be bisected by a tower of gold grillwork containing the emergency stairs and which was topped with a delicate, perforated late–gothic spire. The result, at least on paper, was a facade of dramatic contrasts which radiated like a gleaming beacon into the New York City night. “A decorative scheme of such force,” he explained, becomes a necessity when the theater has to compete with the sheer bulk and height of surrounding skyscrapers. It is far too easy for a low facade to be crushed and lost in the confusion of metropolitan building.“
Aronson, Arnold, “Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban.”
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/architectOfDreams/text.html#theater
Joseph Urban Archives, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/
Joseph Urban Archives, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/
Plan of proposed Max Reinhardt Theatre, New York. Ryerson and Burnham Architecture Archive, Art Institute of Chicago.
Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), 1911, theater and film director, theatrical producer.
Writing for the June 23 “Talk of the Town,” Murdock Pemberton anticipated the construction of a new theatre to be developed by famed Austrian director/producer Max Reinhardt and designed by Austrian-American architect, illustrator and scenic designer Joseph Urban:
Pemberton, Murdock, “Modern Showcase,” n.d. Source: A New Yorker State of Mind, August 2017. https://newyorkerstateofmind.com/2017/08/
Ziegfeld Theatre, New York, 1927
Urban, with Thomas W. Lamb, designed the Ziegfeld Theatre, named for the famed Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., who financed its construction with backing from William Randolph Hearst. It was built in 1926-1927 at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street.
With a seating capacity of 1,638, the theatre opened February 2, 1927 with the musical Rio Rita. itss second show was its most famous – Jerome Kern’s landmark musical Showboat, which opened December 27, 1927 and ran for 572 performances. The theatre was demolished in 1966 to make way for a skyscraper, the Fisher Brothers’ Burlington House.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziegfeld_Theatre_(1927)
Ziegfeld Theatre: facade and auditorium mural
Detail of mural, Ziegfeld Theatre model. Columbia Digital Library Collections.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/html/proj-13702-gallery.html
The Ziegfeld’s murals were said to be the largest oil paining in the world. A medieval fantasy celebrating life and love decorated the uninterrupted curves of the elliptical auditorium.
Loring, John, Joseph Urban. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2010, p. 51; illustration p. 144.
Joseph Urban Archives, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/archives/rbml/urban/
Urban in his New York office, 1920
JOSEPH URBAN, the Vienna-born architect who died in 1933, designed furniture, stage sets, interiors, decorative objects and entire buildings….
But Joseph Urban managed to design sets for the Metropolitan Opera and the Ziegfeld Follies at the same time he was designing buildings for their companies, a neat trick indeed. His remarkable career is far too little appreciated today – in part because none of the design realms in which Urban worked could quite claim him as their own. His career as a set designer, as well as his tendency to give his buildings something of a stage-set quality, made him a bit suspect in architectural circles, and he did not leave an oeuvre of set designs or furniture designs quite large enough to make him a giant in either of those worlds.
Goldberger, Paul, “At the Cooper-Hewitt, Designs of Joseph Urban,” New York Times, Section 1, Page 75, Dec. 20, 1987. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/20/arts/at-the-cooper-hewitt-designs-of-joseph-urban.html