>Here’s our good friend Johannes Gutenberg keeping an eye on the Mainz State Theatre – the Staatstheater.

(It used to be called the City Theatre – Stadttheater – but obviously got ideas above its station somewhere around 1989)

The theatre was built between 1829 and 1833 by Georg Moller, the star architect and city planner of his day.
In its original form, it was revolutionary, with a semicircular extension suggesting the separation of the auditorium from the stage in a radical departure from classical theatre architecture.

Safety considerations and the need for greater seating capacity resulted in a significant dilution of the design in 1909.

Dilution? They buggered it up.

But it’s still a fine structure and acoustically quite exceptional.

The glass dome perched on top – not uncontroversial, as it’s euphemistically described – houses “Mollers Restaurant”, a pretty flash eating place.

Even less uncontroversial is the poor (lack of?) sound insulation between the restaurant and theatre.

The muted clinking of glasses wouldn’t appear to be much of a problem, but when private functions kick into the raucous singing of rugby songs (or whatever the local equivalent of “Dinah, Dinah” might be), the ballet aficionados who’ve plonked down €80 or so for a seat tend to get somewhat shirty….

12 Apr This entry was published on 12 April, 2007 at 12:21. It’s filed under Culture, Mainz and tagged Architecture. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.