Building the Fourth Wall

Our tour of Krannert was wonderful and enlightening, of course, but I'd like to save myself from the ordeal of explaining the whole thing again. If you'd like, I do have more pictures, so feel free to get in contact with me if you wanted to see them, but really I'd like to just talk about one very impressive room and it's importance to the building as a whole.

In media, we talk about the idea of the fourth wall as a symbolism for the presence or absence of metafiction in a text. The idea itself comes from theater. Imagine, if you will, a play set in a room. We know that rooms tend to have four walls, one in each direction, but on a stage, we see only three. There's the back wall, and the walls to the left and right, but the fourth is missing. The fourth is presumed to be there, but it forms the window between the world of the play and the world of the audience. There is a clear divide between the two sides, and to break the fourth wall (to introduce to the audience the knowledge that what they see is less apart from their world than they might think) is to smash this divide. But, typically, this divide is held.

Really, Krannert holds true to this divide throughout the entire building. On the main floor, where the audience mingles and uses the restroom and grabs a snack, is one world. However, an entirely different world exists below their feet, where the stages and, more importantly, the staging areas are. And, at the very center of this otherworld lies the Scene Shop.

A visitor's first view into the Scene Shop

The scene shop is where production teams build the sets for the productions to be held. It's, by its nature, a very large room, and very colorful. Whereas other such industrial-inspired spaces might be more drab or simple, the Scene Shop seems almost to bring the very energy of a production into itself in order to spawn the setpieces like the replicator from Star Trek.

Decorations under construction or waiting to be moved to their proper stages adorn the walls

To the left, a giant space for canvases that can be hydraulically lifted and dropped makes painting pieces easier

The room embodies the ideal for a creative space, a space to be occupied by people intending to work creatively. Decorations under construction hanging from walls make both convenient storage places and colorful distraction from the gray of the walls and ceiling. The warm colors of the wooden workspaces help as well. As can be seen two pictures up, power lines hang all but haphazardly above work areas to be as simple to engage with as possible. The room is designed, from its mechanical systems to its aesthetics, to be a generation point for creativity.

The floor is special, too; supposedly, the room lies on its own foundation, so work is never interrupted, even during shows

The room is marked important by its structure as well. It lies in the center of the underworld of Krannert, with access to every stage, so that transport of setpieces built inside is possible. It is the heart of the building. As our guide explained, the room is even built on a separate foundation from most of the rest of the building (she explained that one of the theaters, the Studio Theater, I think, shares the foundation, but otherwise separate from nearly everything). This is so that production teams may work anytime. If there's a show going on, the noise and vibrations from the shop won't disrupt it. There are never noise complaints from audiences above, let alone sleeping residents of ISR or apartments next door. In nearly every way possible, this one room is signified to be significant in the design of the building. After all, how easy would it be to hold a play without a set? Possible, certainly (Shakespeare did it that way), but not desirable. The Scene Shop is the heart of Krannert, pumping important nutrients (decorations) to every limb (theater).