OTHER TECH

My love for old movie theaters is not unconditional. Some landmarks from the 1920s and '30s, mostly located in major metropolitan areas, still inspire awe. But take a closer look at the hundreds of suburban theaters of that era that escaped the wrecking ball, and that awe is replaced by mild disappointment: You enter through marquees that tease with the promise of visual wonders inside, only to find yourself in big, underwhelming barns. For every theater designed by Charles Lee, John Eberson, or Rapp and Rapp (to name just a few of the star architects of the movie-palace era), hundreds of others remind us that architectural excellence was as rare then as it is now.

When budgets were tight, theater architects would use whatever stock moldings were readily available, regardless of whether their scale or style was the right one. Under pressure to produce working drawings quickly, they would create bland rectangular auditoriums - not too dissimilar from today's multiplexes. They would then try to camouflage the blandness with a host of design embellishments taken willy-nilly from a variety of architectural styles that more often than not had no right to exist side by side.

I sympathize with that: There's no such thing as 24/7 inspiration. But even though not every movie palace could make a claim to greatness, most still managed to excite theatergoers. Their romantic fascination with faraway cultures - Egyptian, Spanish, Moorish, Chinese - was hard to resist. They put such effort in dazzling the senses that despite their lack of stylistic consistency, they charmed and disarmed the moviegoing audience of their era just like they do to us today.

My work as a theater designer has been highlighted by similar contradictions and extremes. Now and then, I've been able to capture some of the spirit of an old movie palace, but I've also made some embarrassing mistakes. Look closely at some of my work from the early '90s, and you'll discover the same errors you often see in its movie-palace siblings: wrong scale, poorly chosen details, boring room shapes, and so on and so on. To be quite honest, I've tried to hide any unflattering records of my work, but it's useless; they're out there featured in books and in magazine articles, a constant reminder of what can go wrong when lack of formal training is combined with naiveté.

Sometimes I wish I had a degree in architecture, but then I think that if I'd gone to school, I might have been less hesitant to take chances. Schooling might have made me think twice before, in the late '80s, I closed my eyes, crossed my heart, and jumped right into designing theaters.