Hannah, Dorita
Hannah, Dorita
Bio Sketch
Dorita Hannah is a New Zealand architect, independent academic, visual artist, and designer working across performance design and space. BArch (hons) University of Auckland (1984); MA in Performance Studies with Distinction, New York University (2000); PhD with Distinction, NYU Tisch School of the Arts (2008) — the dissertation Event-space: Theater Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde, which became her book of the same name (Routledge, 2018). She practiced as Hannah Wallace Architects (with Felicity Wallace), designing Auckland's Watershed Theatre (1991, rebuilt 1993), and has taught architecture, design, and visual arts at Victoria University of Wellington and Massey University (New Zealand) and in Australia, Serbia, the Netherlands, China, the USA, and Finland — a "self-professed nomadic professor." Her practice and research focus on performance space and spatial performativity, spanning the spatial, visual, performing, and culinary arts; her designs "incorporate scenography, interior, exhibition and installation design." Co-editor with Olav Harsløf of Performance Design (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008); co-editor with Omar Khan of the Journal of Architectural Education special issue Performance/Architecture (61.4, 2008); multiple Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards (costume, 1994; set, 1996); twice finalist for the A+W•NZ Dulux Awards for a career supporting diversity in architecture; Prague Quadrennial participant, juror, and commissioner.
Key Works
- *Event-space: A performance model for spatial design* (2018) — the Marinic Reader's ch. 35: interior design as scenography, the event-space theory (Tschumi → Derrida → Austin → Kwinter → Deleuze → Massumi → Solà-Morales), and weak architecture as spatial design's resistant posture.
- Event-Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde (Routledge, 2018) — the monograph from her NYU PhD, on the avant-garde's evental theatre architecture (cited as the chapter's source base; not yet ingested).
- Performance Design, co-ed. with Olav Harsløf (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008) — the anthology where McKenzie's "Global Feeling" appeared (cited in ch. 35's notes).
- "Event-Space: Performance Space and Spatial Performativity," in Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction, ed. Jonathan Pitches and Sita Popat (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) — the chapter's earlier text, here applied to interior design.
- "Performance/Architecture," Journal of Architectural Education 61.4, co-ed. with Omar Khan (2008) — the JAE issue where the performance/architecture hyphen (spacing as punctuation) was developed.
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- event-space — her chapter's central concept (attributed to Tschumi, theorized by Hannah): "constructed space is itself an event and an integral driver of experience"
- scenography — her framing term for interior design: experience "structured… through open-ended spatial dramaturgies"
- spatial-performativity — her core research object: "embodied modes of inhabitation within the complex dynamics… of specific sites"
- spacing — the Derridean operation she wields: "the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space"
- spatial-dramaturgy — her development: "the dramatic and social" considered together to yield "a notion of spatial dramaturgy"
- objectile — the Deleuzian event-object she deploys against Lefebvre's "objectality"
- weak-architecture — Solà-Morales's posture she aligns spatial design with: "transience, permeability, and anti-monumentality"
- interior-architecture — the discipline her chapter re-frames as a "discursive practice" between architecture and performance
Relevance to the Core Research
Hannah gives the wiki's interior-architecture cluster its performance-theoretical foundation: the Marinic Reader's other chapters name the interior's temporality (Weinthal), its effects (Odom), its dynamic systems (Taylor) — Hannah supplies the medial theory beneath all three, positioning the discipline "between the everyday and spectacle; between the seemingly eternal and the ephemeral." Her event-space chapter is the conceptual bridge between the wiki's everyday cluster and its spectacle cluster: the quotidian event ("the spectacle of everyday life") and the aesthetic event occupy one continuum of performativity. She is also the Reader's principal theorist of the interior's envelope-free condition ("no longer bound to a structural inner envelope… sited both within and without architecture") — the strongest counterpart to Vanucci's envelope chapter — and her post-catastrophe section (Bataille, Foucault, Lefebvre, post-9/11) supplies the interior cluster's most direct link to the wiki's power-and-space debate.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
