Designing Random Focus.

This article deals with the process of designing random focus in theaters. The third basic relationship between audience and performer is random focus. This is how an architecture of random focus could be made. First, it would require a new idea of architectural space. A performance hall for random focus cannot be shaped like some gigantic pie. Indeed there is no reason to believe that it should be a place; it may be one inside another, or a maze. Certainly it will be ambiguous. Neat distinctions between audience and performer provided by fixed seats are useless and unnecessary. The ceiling of the theatre in Cincinnati is an indication of what is required. Here the elements of enclosure and utility are made into contrasting patterns set against one another. An architecture of random focus could exploit the intricacies and varieties of utility. The jumbled exuberance of U.S. highways seem to shame people and in some excessive act of atonement architecture has laid on layers of design. People design the outside of buildings, their insides, their equipment, their landscapes--and all with different points of view. Less design would be better. The exposed steel beams do not impede the experience of seeing "Man of La Mancha" at the temporary ANTA-Washington Square theatre.