Abstract:
Theatre art and theatre industry are one of the most dwindling industries of Pakistan. Even though
many attempts have been made for its revival, it still suffers from a slow pulsatile growth. Most of the
cultural growth projects remain centered in only few important hubs of Pakistan; usually clouded
within Lahore and Karachi. Cities like Rawalpindi are ignored in such cultural projects mainly due to low
revenue and less investors who are willing to take up on such projects. This has resulted in many public
buildings being eventually abandoned, forming an abundance of dead spaces. One of those spaces
include Odeon Cinema. This thesis focuses upon the journey of adaptive reuse and revival of a an old
heritage public building, which is Odeon Cinema, into a theatre.
In this attempt, this thesis also tends to look at the typology of theatre not only structurally but also
thematically. It studies the relationship of performer and audience and projects those learnings in a
designed space while working with the existing fabric of a heritage building. It is an exciting experiment
on not only typology but also on adaptive reuse theory in architecture.
