By Diamond Schmitt Architects (Birkhäuser, 2024)
In a media and cultural landscape shaped by screens, it may seem counterintuitive that live performance continues to command our attention and emotion. Yet, as Set Pieces: Architecture for the Performing Arts in Fifteen Fragments compellingly demonstrates, the architecture of live performance—its material presence, spatial intimacy, and urban connectivity—still holds profound sway over how we gather, listen, and feel.
Recipient of the 2025 RAIC Architectural Journalism and Media Award, and authored by Diamond Schmitt Architects with contributions from critics, artists, and designers, Set Pieces is an unconventional architectural monograph. Instead of organizing projects chronologically or by building type, the book is structured around fifteen “fragments”—architectural elements that frame, amplify, or transform the experience of live performance. These include lobbies, ceilings, staircases, balconies, wall panels, and even lighting devices—each explored through a close reading of specific projects.
The projects themselves range widely in geography and scale: from the mass timber “Timber Cascade” lobbies at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, to the “Tornado Staircase” at the Buddy Holly Hall in Lubbock, Texas; from the elegant transformation of New York’s David Geffen Hall, to the community-oriented Daniels Spectrum in Toronto’s Regent Park. Each fragment is richly documented and critically interpreted—offering technical detail, cultural narrative, and architectural insight.
What’s especially resonant is the book’s attention to how performance spaces interact with the public realm. In his foreword, Don Schmitt reflects on the firm’s early design for Covent Garden and their continuing focus on lobbies and thresholds—not just as ancillary spaces, but as civic rooms that dissolve boundaries between performer and audience, art and city. This ethos is visible in Vancouver’s own Orpheum or Queen Elizabeth Theatre, but Set Pieces offers a detailed view into how these transitions can be reimagined—architecturally and socially.
Architect Matthew Lella’s introductory essay, “A Way In,” sets the tone with personal and sensorial reflections on space and memory. He argues that architecture should be understood not just visually, but as an embodied experience—a theme echoed throughout the book. Many of the featured projects use wood, light, and transparency not just to delight the eye but to tune the ear and guide the body. The reconfiguration of Geffen Hall in New York, for example, uses a rippling system of acoustic wood panels—designed with input from musicians and millworkers alike—to transform both the sound and the social layout of the room.
The book’s contributors enrich the architectural perspective with broader cultural insight. Justin Davidson’s essay “Why Do Concert Halls Still Matter?” reminds us that performance spaces are among the last civic sanctuaries for collective, attentive experience. This is complemented by Kate Wagner’s “Why Acoustics Matters,” which unpacks the politics of sound and the complex history of architectural acoustics, linking it to broader critiques of modernism and control. Interviews with renowned set designer Mimi Lien and playwright/director Robert Lepage explore how spatial design shapes storytelling from the inside out.
Set Pieces also offers a subtle but powerful critique of the idea that performance spaces are rarefied or elitist. Many of the featured buildings—like Daniels Spectrum—are intentionally designed to break down barriers to entry. The book champions not just design excellence, but cultural equity. It makes the case that architecture for the arts can and should be accessible, transparent, and porous, both physically and socially.
For urbanists, architects, designers, and cultural workers, Set Pieces is more than a monograph—it’s a meditation on how space becomes performance, and how performance, in turn, shapes our sense of place. It invites us to look beyond the stage and into the lobbies, stairwells, ceilings, and streetfronts where public life begins.
***
For more information about Set Pieces, visit the Birkhäuser website or the Diamond Schmitt website.
**
Erick Villagomez is the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver and teaches at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning
