There’s an idea among some architects that a building should somehow resemble the purposes it serves: that an airport should evoke flight; a democratic building should be transparent; an art museum should look like a piece of sculpture. It doesn’t take long to see the limits of this notion. It may be droll, for example, to serve strawberries on strawberry-shaped dishes, but they don’t taste better for it. Monet’s Water Lilies wouldn’t be improved by showing them against blotchy wallpaper in bright impressionist colours. You may similarly want architecture to complement rather than compete.
And so it is with ballet. The last thing choreographers and dancers want, I’m told by people who know, are spaces that swoop and curve in imitation of human movement. They want right angles, straight lines, fixed points and level horizons against which to gauge their actions. Which is why the Dublin-based architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, who in buildings such as their Saw Swee Hock Student Centre for the London School of Economics were not averse to some eccentric shapes, have designed the new Sadler’s Wells East – a “powerhouse for dance”, it calls itself – as a series of piled-up and interlocking rectangular boxes.
