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Joseph Urban: Architect of Dreams
From: Columbia University
| By:
Arnold Aronson |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Drawing on the vast archive of the architect and designer Joseph Urban, housed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery staged an exhibition representing the diverse range of the artist's work. In the following excerpt from the exhibition catalog, the Columbia theater professor Arnold Aronson (right) introduces the scope and historical context of Joseph Urban's work and describes how Urban, in his theatrical productions, used color and imagery to create scenes of imagination and fantasy. |
  ll stage design and all architecture, it might be argued, are the realizations of dreams: ideas that begin as images in the mind are transformed by artists and artisans into tangible manifestations that are made visible to the eye and, in the case of architecture and interior design, made tactile and corporeal. Yet these metaphoric dreams, when realized, do not necessarily possess the qualities we mean when we describe something as "dreamlike." Buildings and rooms have practical functions that root us in the here and now; stage designs often work best when they do not call attention to themselves or when they serve as simulacra for the recognizable, quotidian world. But Joseph Urban--architect, scenographer, illustrator, designer--rarely limited himself to mere functionality. His works--whether department stores, hotels, castles, bridges, restaurants, theaters, art pavilions, book illustrations, or the lavish and often haunting settings for operas, musicals, pageants, and the Ziegfeld Follies--almost always seemed to be the consummation of fantastical visions and flights of fancy intended to take the spectator or occupant on a journey through the imaginary recesses of the soul. |
 Joseph 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. A critic for the New Yorker in 1928, seeking what he thought to be an appropriately derisive term to describe Hearst's International Magazine Building, condemned it as "theatric architecture." On the other hand, there is an architectural quality to Urban's stage designs. Although he rarely created the sculptural environments of his scenographic contemporaries such as Adolph Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, or Robert Edmond Jones--Urban relied much more on painted and decorative elements--an underlying use of structural detail and a sense of fully constructed spaces pervaded his designs. No matter how fanciful or fantastic the imagery he devised, whether onstage or in a book illustration, there was a palpable reality to the representation--as if one could physically enter into this imaginary world. But always, the worlds of architecture and theater intertwined: Joseph Urban built dreamscapes. |
 Carl Maria Georg Joseph Urban, born in Vienna on 26 May 1872, was one of the most significant stage designers of the early twentieth century. The statistics alone are impressive: from 1904 to 1914 more than fifty productions for theaters and opera houses in Vienna and throughout Europe; thirty productions for the short-lived but influential Boston Opera Company, as designer and stage director from 1912 to 1914; fifty-one productions for the Metropolitan Opera of New York between 1917 and his death on 10 July 1933 (some of which remained in the repertory until the mid-1960s); all of Florenz Ziegfeld's productions (Follies, Midnight Frolics, and eighteen musicals) from 1915 on; twenty-six musicals and sixteen plays for other Broadway producers; plus numerous films, mostly for William Randolph Hearst's production company. All this, of course, was in addition to his continued work as an architect, interior designer, and illustrator which had begun in the early 1890s. Urban's importance lay in his virtually unprecedented use of color, his introduction to American theater of many of the techniques and principles of the New Stagecraft, and his architectural sensibility at a time when most stage designers came from a background or training in visual art. |
 Despite his acknowledged importance and influence, he has remained surprisingly underrated, even forgotten. He wrote no theoretical essays, nor did he set down his philosophy in a book; he was a practical man of the theater and while his ultimately more famous colleagues published portfolios of unrealized visionary designs, he turned out actual settings which inevitably had to fit the very real demands of production (even his unbuilt theaters were designed for actual projects that never came to fruition); and finally, his innovations were often in the service of popular entertainment and spectacle (or in the case of architecture, in the lavish homes of the rich and famous). Aesthetically, he was never willing--never saw a reason--to fully abandon ornament or the decorative, so his architecture was out of sync with the developing International Style, and his stage work was never as abstract as that of the most esteemed designers of the New Stagecraft. But as composer Deems Taylor noted in a posthumous appreciation of Urban: |
His greatest misfortune, as well as his greatest glory, is the fact that his contributions to his art were so fundamental that they are taken for granted.... He revolutionized the scene designer's position in the American theatrical world. He was the first to make clear that the designing of stage sets is an art, and that the man who designs them is an artist--or should be. |
Urban and the New Stagecraft
In 1911 Urban was commissioned to design three productions for the new Boston Opera Company's spring 1912 season: Pelléas et Mélisande, Hänsel und Gretel, and Tristan und Isolde. These productions marked a turning point in American scenographic history. Urban was subsequently appointed stage director and designer for the company, and he moved to Boston later in 1912. Scene painting in America at that time was generally a poor version of easel painting. Pictures were painted on canvas and most often were illuminated under undifferentiated white light which flattened the image, destroyed any sense of illusion, and emphasized the wrinkles and flaws in the canvas. In the words of the producer and critic Kenneth Macgowan, this scenery was typified by "large-sized colored cut-outs such as ornament Christmas extravaganzas ... [and] landscapes and elaborately paneled rooms after the manner of bad mid-century oil-paintings in spasmodic three dimensions." |
 Even the most artistically painted versions of such scenery--and there were some notable scenic studios at the time--were nonetheless a kind of semiotic code; they suggested or pointed to the particular, often generic, environment in which the audience was to imagine the play or opera unfolding but which never could be mistaken for the real thing. Urban's Pelléas, however, was a startling revelation to Boston audiences. As described by Macgowan, "it was made of strange, shadowed, and sun-flecked glimpses of wood and fountain, tower, grotto, and castle, vivid in varied color, full of the soft unworldliness of Debussy's music." Summing up Urban's Boston work, Macgowan declared that "his scenery, costumes, and lights have given the productions of the opera-house a distinction which they could never have obtained through their singing and acting alone." This is a remarkable statement. For perhaps the first time anywhere, certainly for the first time in this country, a critic was acknowledging the role of the mise en scène or inszenierung in the theatrical event, placing it on the same artistic level as the music and singing and affirming its ability to shape audience response. |
 The new approach to scenography, known as the New Stagecraft, was a response to the increasingly crowded and overly detailed excesses of late nineteenth-century stage naturalism. In place of simulation, representation, and illusion, the New Stagecraft was typified by simplicity, suggestion, and impressionism. Unnecessary details and clutter were stripped away; locale was created through the spare use of a few emblematic elements; and the scene was made to suggest "an atmosphere of reality, not reality itself; the impression of things, not crude, literal representations," according to Kenneth Macgowan. In 1915 for an article in Theater Magazine, Urban was asked to define "modern" design. "Certain painters, weary of complex combinations of form and color, have sought to return to simple lines and a palette of primary colors," he replied. "Call it modern, if you must, it is in reality Middle Age and Orient mixed. It is Albrecht Dürer, Memling, Watteau, Chardin.... A formula for modern art? It is this--I think--grace and simplicity." |
From Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban, by Arnold Aronson, published in conjunction with the exhibition "Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban," held at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University October 11 through December 16, 2000. All images are from the Joseph Urban collection, part of the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum Collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Copyright 2001 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. |
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