This Week in Aesthetic Immersion: The Paramount Theater

Last Friday we took another jaunt on the 51 bus, but this time in the other direction down to the Paramount Theater. Once the premiere movie palace of Oakland, it's now a California and National Landmark, a stunningly preserved monument to the Art Deco movement and the golden era of movies. The Paramount was designed in a time where great emphasis was put upon creating an environment so distinct from everyday life that it would transport you away from that reality into "a momentary Shangri-La" during your movie going experience. I imagine walking in from the street and entering into this other jungle-inspired world of luxury and the exotic and I'm not sure I'm ready to watch a movie, rather than to stare at the ceiling, stairs, the sheer size of the Grand Lobby. That's what hit me, the space is big and unexpected, the giant neon sign outside only a teaser to the drastic shift in scale you're going to experience. So it's a hard place to photograph. Looking at my first shots, it was clear that I wasn't quite capturing the scale, the grandeur, the emotion of the environment. It seemed I was only able to show small pieces, trying to capture detail work, the big picture was lost. The space is what struck me, so it's what I tried to show by combining my photos and looking at this in my blog, I think you need to click them and see the pictures full size.

The Grand Lobby

My favorite part was the lighting. The "windows" in the lobby maybe not be real but recreates the light of  a golden hour that will last forever. Underneath the balcony seating is incredible fixtures that remind me of giant glowing space flowers. And the ceilings, they were one of my favorite parts, vast back-lit lace. Our knowledgeable tour guide Ken told us that it's possible to walk on these ceiling sections, although we the public don't have access. It would be incredible one day to see the theater from a different perspective.

The ceiling inside the theater. 

This one got confusing so it's not the best, 

but the ceilings were one of my favorite parts. 

Ken gave a us light show, click the link and 

see the whole ceiling change color.

The Paramount was designed during the glamorous era of the roaring twenties, but within a month after the property was bought the stock market crashed, bringing economic crisis that would last a decade. Paramount Publix decided to continue with construction as planned and the theater was completed in a remarkable year and five days, staying on budget by clever use of materials and planning. Despite the increasingly desperate economic climate, the Paramount opened with fanfare, celebrities and ceremony. It was forced to close its doors six months later, and sat empty and dark for decades. The best show in town waiting for a better day.

Always the best show in town

It was weird to walk around the theater and think about the Paramount sitting in disuse for so many years, slowly falling to the wear of time. It's a space where all the details were considered important and were carefully crafted, and after only a short time in the sunshine so to speak, they were locked up and ignored.

My last trip to Peru, I walked with some friends to the ruins of Pumamarka, an unrestored Incan site above the town of Ollantaytambo where we were living. It's a long hike but there are two ways to get there, you can walk a path through the forest or alongside the winding road. We chose the path, it's longer but far more adventurous, a well worn trail for the first couple hours, then a bit more intuitive for the next. There's not much back there, some houses, farms, gated yards, but the forest become denser as you retreat from town. And then suddenly a white-walled complex of large empty rooms, no glass panes in the windows that overlooked an overgrown courtyard, ready and wired for electricity but connected to nothing, an unfinished space that nobody was trying to complete so instead the forest had started its reclamation. Before the recession, when people still were traveling there had been the reason and means to create what I heard was suppose to be a luxury hotel, the largest in town, but then tourism slowed and construction halted. It sits in wait, decaying and more than a little creepy. 

An easily imagined timeline of a building's life might go something like: plan building, build it, occupy it (different groups may come and go), fix it occasionally, and when it's too old, tear it down and repeat. But architecture seems to reach for new heights and superlatives in times of building booms, attempting to create the most modern, or most lavish, or the greatest engineering feats. When the bubble bursts, mass abandonment. The Paramount was completed almost within the first year of the depression and stayed open only 6 months, that to me seems like barely making it. In this recession we experience the same phenomenon, except maybe worse. The entry Ruins of the Present from Bruce Sterling's blog (he is also the author of the Shaping Things book from History of ID) touches upon the lack of a word for uncompleted abandoned building projects that are the new trademark of the places that just a few years ago would see the same building as a symbol of progress and growth. They aren't ruins, but what exactly do you call a building that never gets used? Sculpture? The Wapato Jail in Portland, Oregon never accepted a single inmateafter completion, so is it still a jail? And what do we do with these creations?

When the Oakland Symphony bought the building in the 70s, they had to do a major restoration to bring the theater up to snuff, but it was given a second life. Now owned by the city, it is the home of the East Bay Symphony and is "one of San Francisco Bay's premiere performing arts facilities" -Paramount. We are lucky to have the Paramount around and today we can look at it as a beautiful example of American art deco, but I'm sure it wasn't looking so rosy the day they shut the doors in 1932. Things aren't looking great now for our "squelettes" but perhaps like the Oakland Symphony, it's artists that can save them.