The fact that every seat in a cinema must, irrespective of ite price and position, command an uninterrupted view of the screen has had a very salutary effect on recent theatre design. The old convention which forced the occupants of nents at the extremities of the horseshoe, and more particularly of the boxes, the highest priced of all, to sit uncomfortably askew if they wished to keep more than a part of the stage in view, is now happily becoming a thing of the past.
Too much of an individualist to work in the impersonal terms of orthodox Moderniam, Onkar Kaufmann, in the half-doyen theatres he has built in Berlin and Vienna since the end of the war, attempts nothing that ix very revolutionary in a structural sense. But in each of their Interiory ornament blossoms spontaneously from structure ax Inevitably ax effect from cause. The prodigal fertility and deliente refinement of his decorative nchemex are ways in perfect unman with the scale of his muditoriums. They are rippling trains of vital spurkx which humanize and frolic with constraction, not inertly redundant revetments of steel and concrete skeletons, No more personal buildings exist, He has held and weighed them one and all in the hollow of hix hand till the nice equilibrium of the Individual and the impersonal has adjusted itself. Yet withal, though of 0 particular age or school, they are wholly of today, The reflorercence of civilisation stands between them and all the ornamental cliches which held sway before the The master-crafteman's hand, levin touching in ench least detail and imparting separate identity, a sovereign grace, to the most minor fitment, has orchestrated their contrapuntal integration into reverberant aria which trills for very jolede-vive. The greatest living macetro of pure design, Kaufmann ix incidentally—tut ly, ax it were, incidentally—" fine and extremely competent architect. No decorator has ever excelled his architectural sense of the theatre. An essentially dramatic quality, volatile ax comedy, witty ax apt dialogue, informs the décor of his ensembles, There ie nothing interchangeable about his work. Not one of his motifs would be equally at home in another of hix interiors. The proscenium of the Kurfurstendamm Theatre in a little masterpiece of dramatic design, an exquisitely appropriate tour-de-force. OF take the facade of hix Komodie, moony struck maiden in her nightdress. Here the sheer power of fantasy has known how to obtain a nocturnal effect, wholly different from, but in no wise snerificed to, the diurnal. The charm of the one does not eclipse, but ix rather complementary to, the charm of the other, Each Ix ea-equal and independent. Like two parallel straight ines they are doomed never to meet or coincide, but only to enhance each other. See how delicately and surely the more dramatic neo-baroque mouldings of the narrow towor-Wke front are etched in by the evocative glamour of the flood-lighting! The balance of voids and solids is transposed. Detail salient by day becomes muffled by night, and vice versa. It is " vision of a fairy world, an iMuminated pavilion gaily decked with airy Maria-Theresan chinolseriex some discreet corner of a palace park. Yet in point of fact this elegant princely "folly" ies on what is now the chief thoroughfare of Berlin, the broad and blatant nineteenth and twentieth-century Kurfurstendamm, sizaling with its Neon advertisements and uproarious with (hrenging trims and motor-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.