The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The design for The Hunchback of Notre Dame began with the idea that the cathedral should not behave like a static backdrop. Notre Dame needed to feel like the centre of the world: a place of power, spectacle, religion, confinement, memory, and community.

Rather than building a single literal cathedral façade, I created a modular architectural system that could continuously reveal new sides of the same…

The design for The Hunchback of Notre Dame began with the idea that the cathedral should not behave like a static backdrop. Notre Dame needed to feel like the centre of the world: a place of power, spectacle, religion, confinement, memory, and community.

Rather than building a single literal cathedral façade, I created a modular architectural system that could continuously reveal new sides of the same environment. The base set used warm brown structure with unpainted pine accents, giving the world a handcrafted, historic character while leaving room for texture, lighting, fabric, and projection to reshape its mood.

The large balcony and choir-box units were designed to do much of the heavy lifting. They could be flipped, pushed together, or separated to create the cathedral balcony, a theatrical platform, Quasimodo’s tower room, and other architectural spaces. In Quasimodo’s room, the joined balcony units became a bed platform and enclosure, while movable boxes held his treasures and doubled as seating. For the cathedral balcony, the same units shifted into a monumental raised space, with a larger downstage window flown in behind the performers.

Theatre itself became part of the visual language. In the “stage” sequence, a curtain wall made from ribbons flew in and was completed by the cast, who placed and held elements in position. Poles dropped into place to support a rip-away curtain, while smaller curtain accents transformed the choir boxes. This allowed the audience to see the world being assembled before them, reinforcing the storytelling tradition and ritual at the heart of the piece.

The design also explored several broader visual directions, including open timber framing, a city-perspective environment, book-inspired architecture, and a rock-textured world designed for projection mapping. Those explorations helped identify the final approach: a flexible scenic vocabulary capable of feeling intimate, sacred, imposing, and theatrical without ever losing its practical ability to transform.