Auditorium, Paramount Theatre, Oakland

On Wednesday I wrote about the exterior of the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. The theatre was designed by Timothy Pflueger and celebrated its opening with a gala premiere on 16 December 1931.

The auditorium was designed to seat 3,600 people and my photo of the back rows of the stalls (above) gives a taste of the lavish decoration of the lighting and on the ceiling and walls. The view from the circle, however, is breathtaking.

Pflueger brought Dorothy Wright Liebes onto the project as a special consultant on textiles and she would have had major input into the main stage curtain but it was Michael A Goodman who drew and painted the decoration.

Gerald Fitzgerald, who produced the cartoons that were used for the decoration on the facade of the theatre, also created preliminary designs for the bas-relief sculptured panels on the walls of the auditorium.

The panels were executed by Robert Boardman Howard.

Howard worked with Ralph Stackpole on the ceiling panel above the proscenium depicting the Greek god Poseidon.

The main part of the ceiling is constructed using metal fins to help with the accoustics. The fins arranged in a stylised representation of the Egyptian goddess Isis repeated across the five panels making up the rest of the ceiling.

References:
Paramount Theatre website
Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger, Therese Poletti