SYLVAN THEATRE

An international architectural competition for renovation proposals for the summer theater in Cherkasy’s Pine Forest Park.

The backstory:

The summer theater was built in 1966-67. Today, it is an abandoned structure in need of restoration and renovation that matches the needs of modern-day Cherkasy.

In the summer of 2015 a group of local volunteers started raising funds for revitalizing the summer theater. Thanks to the city’s citizens, enough funds were collected to constitute a prize for the architectural competition.

We conducted a survey of the fundraising campaign’s participants about their wishes regarding the theater’s future and the way the money that had been collected would be used. In this way, city residents made the decision about holding an architectural proposal competition. Proposal requirements were based on the survey results.

The competition took place from April 4th through July 31st, 2016. We obtained 37 project proposals from 25 countries. An independent professional jury chose the 6 projects that best fulfilled the given requirements. The winner was chosen by the community of Cherkasy via online and offline voting, which continued until September 15th, 2016. Overall, 1349 Cherkasy residents took part in the voting. Eric Rodrigues of Toronto, Canada was the winner, with 536 votes.

More information about the top 6 projects and the voting is available here. Voting results and details of the winning project are available here.  

The winner was awarded a prize of $1000, which was raised by the Cherkasy community during the charitable events CherITy Fest and Promolod Fest in the summer of 2015.

We continued to collaborate with the competition winner, Canadian architect Eric Rodrigues, to move the project toward implementation. With the help of our patrons, we have drawn up design estimates and are preparing a presentation to use for international crowdfunding.

However, this project is currently on pause, as its realization depends not only on our intentions and actions, but also on action from the city administration.