The Industry’s production of Yuval Sharon’s Hopscotch, Los Angeles, CA, 2015
Designed and built in collaboration with Emmett Zeifman
SCI-Arc students contributed to the fabrication of furniture & cladding
Published in The LA Times and The Journal of the AIA, 2015
Photo credits: Joshua Lipton
The Central Hub is a temporary theater designed and built to host performances of Hopscotch, a contemporary opera by director Yuval Sharon. Hopscotch was comprised of parallel series of chapters performed in moving limousines and other locations scattered throughout Los Angeles. The Central Hub, the focal point of the production, served as a temporary multimedia theater featuring live broadcasts of the distributed performances throughout the day and hosting the opera’s finale. Importantly, the Hub was open to the public for each weekend performance. This allowed anyone to access to this cultural experience free of charge, not only those who had purchased tickets for the intimate performances in the limos.Constructed in the southwest portion of the SCI-Arc parking lot, the Hub needed to house 24 screens, up to 300 audience members equipped with multi-channel receivers and headphones and, during the finale of each performance, a number of limousines that entered into the Hub, collapsing the distance between the real and virtual performances.
The structure, largely concentric, is intersected by the two traffic lanes that allow the limos to drive through the center of the hub and disrupt its centrality. The wood structural frame shapes an irregular exterior surface that shifts between concave and convex conic geometry, designed to shape the external site along its peripery. This frame was clad on the exterior with recycled vinyl billboards, noatable detritus of car culture in Los Angeles, and on the interior with lycra stretched across the interior cylinder. The cavity between these two layer of cladding and wood framing provided backstage space for AV technicians, videographer oversight and significant amouts of cable and electrical equipment. The interior panorama of performances allowed the audience to experience a never before realized simultaneity of life across Los Angeles.