Royal Shakespeare Theatre

The Victorian Shakespeare Memorial Theatre burned down in March 1926. The governors held an open international competition, judged from anonymous drawings, and the winner announced in 1928 was Elisabeth Scott, twenty-nine years old and three years qualified — the first woman to take a major British public building competition, a fact the press reported in terms that have not aged well. The theatre she built between 1929 and 1932, with her fellow Architectural Association students Alison Sleigh and John Chiene Shepherd, is a stripped brick mass on the bank of the Avon: long horizontal courses, tall window bays recessed between shallow piers, and a fly tower treated as a plain block rather than disguised. Inside it was emphatically of its moment, with Art Deco stair halls and a proscenium auditorium seating about fourteen hundred on three tiers. Actors complained about the distance to the back row almost at once. The 2007–10 Transformation Project by Bennetts Associates cut a thrust-stage auditorium into the shell and added an observation tower, leaving Scott's exterior largely intact.