You’ve spent your career working in a
relatively young and little understood part
of the architecture industry. What are its
origins? RAY WINKLER: I think the reason
entertainment architecture gained traction
was the need for stadium concerts to scale up,
to make an impact on an environment that is
much larger than the stage itself.
If you look at the history of concert
design, you have examples like The Beatles
playing at Shea Stadium in the mid-’60s,
where the stage was literally just a small
platform, lit using the floodlights for the
baseball field. The audience was so loud that
The Beatles couldn’t hear themselves, and
the audience couldn’t hear The Beatles – the
equipment at the time was just not geared up
to deal with these spatial challenges. By 1977,
when Stufish founder Mark Fisher worked
with engineer Frei Otto to create the famous
umbrella structures for Pink Floyd’s Animals
tour, musicians were beginning to better
understand that they needed a little help to
register, both sonically and visually, when
playing to such large crowds.
The reason these stages exist is
to enable the band to transmit the largest
possible presence. They’re performing in an
environment that requires them to communi-
cate at levels beyond what they could achieve
as individuals. That’s why entertainment
architecture came about in the first place.
Has the rapid pace of technological change
over the last couple of decades made a
fundamental difference in what’s possible in
entertainment architecture? With advances
in technology – which make things undoubt-
edly brighter, louder and better – we can
produce far more immersive experiences for
the audience. But none of these advances
can guarantee that the show is good – they
are just the tools with which we play. What
really matters is a narrative that reflects the
ambitions and the ideas of the band. All
the technical choices we make are aimed at
supplementing the delivery of that narrative.
Technology isn’t the tail that wags the dog.
Take Jay-Z and Beyonce’s 2018
OTR II, where we used a heroic 26-m span-
ning bridge track-out system that could move
over the audience. The area underneath the
bridge, between the two catwalks, offered an
incredible level of immersion and proximity
to the audience. It only made sense, though,
because it tallied with what the artists wanted
to achieve, the story they wanted to tell.Are contemporary concertgoers more
demanding of the visual spectacle than
those of previous generations? Today’s
audience undoubtedly has higher expecta-
tions. If you look at what’s available now- just the sheer volume of media outlets
both physical and digital, or the number of
concerts and theatre shows in London on
any given day – it’s overwhelming. People
have a huge amount of choice, much more
so than before, so the pressure on entertain-
ment architects is to make something really
stand out. The key to doing so is not the
addition of more layers of technology for
technology’s sake, however. Anybody can
rent a high-resolution video screen, a light-
ing rig, a PA system – what counts is how
you put the components together.
Take the Rolling Stones’ No Filter
tour. Instead of having one big screen at the
back, we used four screens, each representing
one of the four principal band members. And
instead of having screens that appeared to
be flat, we gave them a 1.5-m-deep return, so
they looked like monolithic slabs, reminiscent
of those in 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can
see how the very same video panel that we’re
using in other shows – and have used previ-
ously, and will use in the future – required a
certain amount of tweaking before it became
utterly bespoke to the No Filter show. Simi-
larly, 80 per cent of the U2 set for Vertigo,
in terms of the steel structure, was used for
Robbie Williams’ Close Encounters tour. It’s
recycled, but recycling doesn’t limit what you
can do. The only limit is your imagination –
how can you employ the tools at hand?The way people experience your work has
changed drastically. Now it’s often medi-
ated by the mobile phone, and its success
depends on both the live event and the
way it’s shared online. Do such aspects
influence the way you design? The ‘Insta-
gram moment’ is a term we use a lot in our
discussions, both internally and with clients.
Twenty years ago the set would have »‘As tribal
people, we
will always
want to
congregate
around our
preferred
experiences’
150 SHOWS