CITY LIVING ROOM: Urban Renewal and Adaptive Reuse with In the Typology of Theatre

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.