Word: glassing
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...aluminum tubes. From head-on it looks like a silvery bar code that's been sliced by asymmetrical window slots. Anyone approaching it will be on a journey even before the play begins. You enter by way of a descent, a wide concrete ramp that slopes down to a glass-walled lobby, one story below ground, made of stark concrete and gray metal, where light swords hang like stalactites from the ceiling. From the time of Orpheus and before, a subterranean journey has had psychological reverberations. This one bears just a hint of a descent into a stony underworld...
...that may or may not be a metaphor for rebirth. In most theaters, the auxiliary spaces - things like the lobby, rehearsal rooms, café and offices - surround the auditorium. Because the Wyly stacks those on the floors above and below, it was possible to surround the stage area with glass walls on three sides. Directors can use the outside world as a backdrop to the action on stage or close it off with large shades. (See pictures of endangered monuments...
...This is unusual but not unheard of. A few years ago the architects Diller, Scofidio & Renfro provided the same kind of glass-walled backdrop for the theater they designed as part of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, and it's worked well there, though one factor may be that it looks out on a water view that's calmer and more predictable than a cityscape. The Wyly is also a very flexible cavity, with movable banks of seats and balconies that can slide in and out or fly up and disappear. Even the proscenium can be raised and lowered...
...like the one Pei provided for the lobby of his symphony hall nearby. Foster and his head of design, Spencer de Grey, weren't interested in rethinking the opera house from the ground up. What they did instead was briskly update it in Foster's gleaming but uncompromisingly modern glass-and-steel idiom...
...lightbulb. As early as 1820, inventors were homing in on the principles that would lead to the first electric illumination. An English inventor, Joseph Swan, took their early work and developed the basis of the modern electric lightbulb in 1879 - a thin paper or metal filament surrounded by a glass-enclosed vacuum. When electricity runs through the filament, the bulb glows. Edison refined the design, trying filaments made out of platinum and cotton before eventually settling on carbonized bamboo, capable of burning for more than 1,200 hours. With Edison's design - and the settlement of a lawsuit with Swan...