Ancient Egyptian’s Reincarnation

Like most American historic centers that have begun the arduous process of revitalization during the last decade, Hollywood has vacillated between guarding its historic fabric too preciously and rubbing it out entirely. Now if Hollywood wants to know how to revive its faded legacy, it has a perfect model right under its nose.

The Egyptian Theatre, opened in 1922 by Sid Grauman as a home for movie premieres, underwent a series of disastrous alterations before shutting down in 1992. In its current incarnation as the new home of the American Cinematheque, which opens to the public Saturday, it is a perfect balance between preserving what is best about the past and taking a calculated leap toward the future. Located at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas Avenue, the theater will be the nonprofit film center’s first permanent home and will give it an instant presence in Los Angeles’ cultural landscape. But it will also have a much broader civic impact. By dissolving the border between the spontaneous energy of the street and the communal hypnosis of watching a movie, it will do more to reinvigorate Hollywood’s decrepit street life than projects with 50 times the budget. It will create a sorely needed public event along a stretch of the boulevard that until now had little reason to exist but for its faded glamour.

The $14-million project by Hodgetts + Fung, the Santa Monica-based firm best known for its playful pop-art sensibility, transforms Grauman’s flamboyant theater into a superior version of its former self by inserting a tough high-tech auditorium into the building’s original historic frame and by stressing function over false stage effects.

The design begins at the sidewalk. Like its more famous cousin, Mann’s Chinese Theater, the Egyptian is set back from the street and approached along a 140-foot-long forecourt. Much of the old decor remains: a faux pharaoh’s head mounted on a wall; ocher-colored exterior walls meant to evoke the giant stones of the pyramids. But the forecourt is now conceived as an extension of the public life of both the street and the lobby inside.

Courtyard to Function as a Meeting Ground

The architects inserted twin rows of slender palm trees along the exterior forecourt, strengthening the theater’s central axis and drawing people into the building. Low stone planters function as simple benches. Along one side, a row of doors opens into what was once a men’s clothing store and will soon become a cozy late-night restaurant. An exterior stairway--which originally led nowhere--will take you up to the restaurant’s rooftop terrace. When it opens, the courtyard will function as a perfect public room, a place to watch and be watched, where strangers can intimately intermingle. But it is only the first in a series of thresholds leading to the auditorium.

During the ‘50s, the theater’s main facade was covered by a grotesque aluminum storefront. Now, a massive portico--enclosed behind thick Egyptian-style columns--again frames the theater’s entryway at the courtyard’s far end. Both the front entrance and the doors leading to the auditorium are glass, visually connecting inner and outer worlds. The lobby’s low ceiling--stenciled in an Egyptian motif--gives the room a strong horizontal feel, preparing you for the soaring grandeur of the auditorium. In effect, the architects conceived the entire lobby as an extension of this exterior space. Once inside, your gaze extends all the way out to the street.

The lobby is also where the subtle tensions between the historic and the new first become apparent. Much of the faux Egyptian decor was damaged during previous renovations and the Northridge earthquake. Rather than seamlessly fuse the new with the old, Hodgetts + Fung play with the tensions between the two. Where the historical fabric has been torn out, the scars are preserved, so that the building’s various incarnations are still evident. In order to give the lobby more breathing room, the auditorium has been pushed forward 25 feet, in the process eliminating what were once the worst seats in the house--those tucked awkwardly under the balcony.

To one side of the lobby, a ramp leads down to the entry of a 68-seat screening room. This smaller auditorium is designed as a free-standing black box, its low vaulted roof detached from the lobby’s ceiling above, leaving the stenciled hieroglyphics exposed. This gives the lobby a sense of scale, but the ramp also provides intimate places to mingle and chat. The screening room becomes a counterpoint to the grander event within the auditorium.

Setting for Glamorous Shared Spectacle

It is in the 50-foot-high, 650-seat main auditorium, however, that the delightful frictions of a public event are replaced by a more glamorous shared spectacle. The awkward form of the original, which had curved walls decorated in mock Egyptian themes, presented daunting acoustical and visual problems. The architects solved these by inserting a high-tech framework within the shell of the old theater. On either side, thick steel columns support mechanical acoustical plywood panels, their surfaces punctured by a grid of holes. The interstitial spaces--between old and new--become circulation corridors, punctuated by twin ephemeral black towers that house stairwells leading up to the balcony.

The mechanical panels also serve a more subtle function. While the audience mills around looking for seats, the panels are left open, exposing the historic fabric of the theater’s outer walls. Once the lights dim, the panels slide backward on either side like giant black veils, clicking into place and focusing the audience’s gaze toward the screen. The effect is one of communal intimacy.

In a very real sense, the design functions as a series of filters, a layering of increasingly intimate public moments. The screen becomes a reflection of the activity outside, as if the elusive images of civic life were momentarily captured, like flickering moths trapped in a black box.

Clearly Hodgetts + Fung has none of the lingering paranoia that marks many large-scale urban redevelopment projects today, most of which have become sanitized havens for consumption, merchandising machines that shut out the chaotic vitality of the city in favor of a more manipulative environment. Here, instead, art and urban life, dream and reality are all tightly linked, and the shared experience of the street wonderfully reasserts itself.