Architects facing the blank screen confront the necessity of invention when they have to create something from nothing. But the blankness was especially daunting for Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in her set design for “Deep Blue Sea,” when she faced 38,000 square feet of blankness in the cavernous Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The size of the floor area for the sprawling dance opera by the legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones lands somewhere between a football field and the concourse at Grand Central Terminal.
But besides the monumental scale, the challenge for Diller was how—as an architect trained to think three-dimensionally—to design in a flatland of two dimensions. There were no walls bordering a conventional proscenium stage, not even an invisible fourth wall: the only “wall” in this theater in the round, ringed by bleachers, was simply the ground. The floor acted as a screen on which the set design was projected. Time was the third dimension. For nearly two hours, the projections shaped changing floor plans that supported a story told through music, Jones’s own narration, and his specialty, expressive movement.
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