Mahen Theatre
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Transcript
The Mahen Theatre opened in 1882 as the German City Theatre. It became famous for early use of electric lighting supplied with technology associated with Thomas Edison’s system.
The building tells two Brno stories at once. First, the industrial city had the technical and financial capacity to adopt new urban technologies rapidly. Second, cultural institutions were entangled with language and national politics.
After Czechoslovakia formed, the theatre’s institutional identity changed and it later took the name of Czech writer Jiří Mahen.
A theatre may seem less industrial than a textile mill, but electricity, engineering and mass urban audiences made modern cultural life possible.
Brno’s modernism did not appear because architects suddenly discovered white walls. It grew out of a city already obsessed with technology.