Soft Core: Community Performance in the Madison Valley

Abstract

This thesis explores building design in the context of community development through community theater. It explores the idea of community theater as something that is specific to people and place relative to professional theater, creating different needs for types of performance spaces. The project explores this form of theater as a process-oriented manner of performance requiring a flexible building type that can accommodate a broad range of performance types stemming from the needs of a particular community. This project uses the Madison/Miller neighborhood to create a dialogue between the strengths of that particular community and the program of the building as a basis for the design of the theater space. It is an experiment in designing with the idea that the 'core' of a community is an idea that is poly-centric and constantly changing.