Strasbourg’s new city theatre, the “Théâtre Le Maillon”, can leave visitors feeling uneasy the first time they approach it. Reminiscent of a gigantic stack of shipping containers, its black-stained, bare concrete facade and box-like shape emanate echoes of a harsh industrial environment. Yet on the inside, its enormous dimensions and space are well-lit, and impress without intimidating. This demonstrates the building’s immense flexibility as a facility that can adapt to any conceivable configuration or art form.
The further the visitors venture into the theatre, the more they are embraced by the ambience of a creative workshop – and giant blank canvas waiting to be brought to life. This is exactly what the planning team at LAN Architecture had in mind when they submitted their contract-winning bid for the project. Italian architect Umberto Napolitano, one of the founders of the Parisian architects’ bureau, and his team stated explicitly that they weren’t looking to build a theatre – what they wanted to create was a theatre factory, inspired by Italian rationalism and the monumentalist tradition of Strasbourg’s great cultural institutes.
They wanted to make a building that was filled with light, space, and emptiness – a space that could exist in a state of constant flux, where the possibilities would be endless. And that is what they did. The uniform facade exists simply as a framework, with no dominant, grand entrance or hierarchy between the front and rear to give it any sense of definition. The interior, on the other hand, is hyper-flexible, and can adapt to any conceivable configuration or art form.
40 years as a nomadic theatre
One of the reasons the team wanted to adopt this approach is rooted in the theatre’s history. Originally known as the Maillon Cultural Centre, it was founded in 1978 in a factory hall in Hautepierre, on the outskirts of Strasbourg itself. Right from the start, the founders wanted to free the concept of theatre from its elite trappings and break away from artistic and social conventions. They wanted to bridge divides – which is why they called their project “Le Maillon”, or “The Link”. French-German collaboration also played an important role in the theatre’s history right from its early days, and in 2002 it was given the title “The European Stage”.
In 1999, the Maillon moved to an international trade show hangar in Strasbourg’s Wacken district. On account of their new venue, the theatre company regularly had to dismantle their entire infrastructure and equipment to clear the space for trade shows and expos. This sense of impermanence can still be felt in the theatre today. The nomadic nature of the company’s operations led to an increasingly avant-garde and experimental programme, heightening its artistic quality and transforming the Maillon into a legend among theatres.
All the world’s a stage
The architects were careful to incorporate the theatre’s chameleonic character into the design for its new build close to the European Parliament, deliberately eschewing the traditional delineation between the lobby, the auditorium and the backstage area. Napolitano describes the Maillon as “a porous urban building with a modular structure that is constantly reinventing itself”. Like the designs of Gropius, it aims to break down boundaries: between the building and its urban surroundings, between the interior and the outdoor areas, and between the artists and the audience.
Almost none of the spaces inside the theatre are permanently defined. The moving walls allow the company to connect, change and play around with all the different areas. The two auditoriums are designed based on a modular principle that makes them incredibly versatile and allows the seats to be arranged in many different ways: flat, frontal, bifrontal or trifrontal. With its 700-person capacity, 45 by 24-metre area and height of over 14 metres, the main auditorium alone could fit the entirety of the old theatre building inside it, and the opening windows and folding, movable elements can be used to connect different spaces. Thanks to these ingenious features, almost the full 7,000 square metres of the Maillon – with the exception of the areas that are not open to the public – can be used for performances. All the theatre’s a stage!
All these options enable the company to tackle immersive and participative forms of theatre – a modern concept in which the audience play a key role. These types of play are incredibly dynamic experiences, and can lead to surprising twists. In this context, the environment needs to be incredibly flexible. This allows the company to turn the auditorium into a stage, the stage into an auditorium, or the atrium into a backdrop.
All in all, it’s safe to say that openness, spontaneity and flexibility are all part of the experience at the Maillon. As the motto engraved in the concrete wall of the stairs leading to the main auditorium says, “Le théâtre peut etre le lieu il semble que quelque chose se passe” – the theatre is anywhere where something seems to happen.
A custom solution for the perfect fit
In order to ensure that the cero systems fitted perfectly into the facade, cero made them with no automatic controls so the crossbars would have a profile of just 40 millimetres. Thanks to their ingenious engineering, however, the elements – which weigh six hundred kilograms each – can still be moved effortlessly and quietly.
The built-in SKN 176 double glass provides protection from the sun’s rays. The 52-millimetre-thick glass elements are made of triple laminated safety glass and offer excellent thermal insulation, with a Ug value of 0.7 W/m2K. Whether open or closed, the cero sliding windows always uphold the Maillon’s values of openness, spontaneity and flexibility.
