The Drama of Space: Spatial Sequences and Compositions in Architecture by Holger Kleine (review)

The Drama of Space: Spatial Sequences and Compositions in Architecture. By Holger Kleine. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2017; 296 pp.; illustrations. $79.95 cloth, e-book available.

Holger Kleine's The Drama of Space is, at the very least, an extraordinary example of the transferability of dramaturgical knowledge to other disciplines. Kleine is hardly the first one to observe that every built space has its own narrative, whether it was intended or not intended by the architect. As early as 1948, the Centre d'Etudes Philosophiques et Techniques du Théâtre at the Sorbonne organized a symposium on dramaturgy and architecture, and luminaries from both fields participated, including the great actor and director Louis Jouvet, architecture celebrity Le Corbusier, and scholars who were engaged in cross-disciplinary aesthetics such as Étienne Souriau.¹ More recently, Cathy Turner turned to architecture in her productive engagements with the dramaturgy of site-specific and immersive performance (2015). However, Kleine, a working architect who practices and teaches in Germany, is, to my knowledge, the first author who thoroughly and consistently employed dramaturgical ideas and methods in a scholarly work that directly engages architectural practice. The fact that his book has been published in English speaks to the author's ambition to reach a broad international audience. That ambition is not misplaced.

Dramaturgy's (re)turn to architecture came hand in hand with the expansion of dramaturgical practice in the past couple of decades. It was this broadening of dramaturgy's reach that led Turner to address the relationship between these two disciplines: if "dramaturgy is architecture (and vice versa), does this help us observe a continuum between the architectures of performance and the performance of architecture […]?" (2010:153). Kleine's answer is a resounding "yes." This affirmative comes not only in the form of theoretical conjectures, but also through specific demonstrations of dramaturgical principles in architecture. Kleine divides the book into four sections, each of which opens with a discussion of relevant dramaturgical principles, and is followed by discussions of case studies. In the first section Kleine introduces the "Basic principles of the dramaturgy of space," which he backs up with a reading of three baroque buildings in Venice; in the second part, "Dramaturgical models," he develops working methods of using dramaturgy in architectural theory; in the third part, which is dedicated to "Dramaturgies of space in contemporary architecture," Kleine offers his dramaturgical reading of 18 contemporary buildings; and in the final part he directly addresses the design of the "drama of space," taking space, time, and body as the key concepts of lived architecture.

Kleine proposes a working definition of spatial dramaturgy as a "creative design and systematic understanding of the effects of space in its temporality" (9). His primary interest, then, is in the experiential aspects of architecture: how users navigate built spaces, and how they interact with them through their perceptions and actions. Therefore, "all phenomena that stimulate us to engage with (or disengage with) a space, as well as all the parameters that help us understand these phenomena and our reaction to them, pertain to the realm of spatial dramaturgy" (9). Both in theatre and in architecture, experience of time is tied with succession, and therein is one of the most important contributions of Kleine's research to dramaturgy. Namely, taking dramatic literature as its starting point, traditional dramaturgy carries over to performance a narratological perspective, which is probably best exemplified in Roland Barthes's observation that the "mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence" (1977:94). If structural analysis of narratives searches for causality, spatial or experiential analysis of narratives loosens this association of succession with meaning production, which gives the experiencer (rather than reader or viewer) an opportunity to actively engage in the building of the narrative. Kleine is aware of the vastness and generality of this approach, and from the get-go he limits it by focusing...