Modern Cinemas: The Spaces That Made Us Dream

The First Architectural Experiments

After the Lumière brothers screened their first film in 1895, the new divertimento spread like wildfire across Europe. Within a few months, films were being shown in Madrid, Barcelona, Valladolid, Seville, Lisbon, and more. The demand for spaces to accommodate this new industry was initially satisfied with open-air spaces, fair booths, private rooms and cafés. At the turn of the 20th century, however, specific spaces began to be designed with an aesthetic that would be associated with modernity, and for entrepreneurs that meant art nouveau architecture. Beginning in the 1920s, the pursuit of modernity was dominated by rationalist architecture, and from the 1930s onward, art deco took centre stage.

The 1930s: The Golden Decade for Cinemas

More than 25 of the rationalist and art deco cinemas from the Iberian peninsula that are listed in the Register were designed in the 1930s. Five of them are of the most interest to us here, and they are prime examples of the type. Three of them, built between 1930 and 1931, are located in Madrid. The first, the Fígaro Cinema-Theatre, designed by López Delgado, with its dual function as a space for cinema and for theatre, embodied the emergence of modernity in Madrid with its publication in issue no. 5 of AC magazine. The Barceló Cinema by Gutiérrez Soto, with both an indoor cinema and an outdoor summer cinema on the roof, is a prime example of the work by “the architect of cinemas”. The third, the Capitol Cinema, located in the Edificio Carrión by Feduchi y Eced, the result of an ideas competition that ended with a direct commission, became the image of the Gran Vía and an emblem of the city. The other two are located in Portugal. They are the Capitólio Cinema-Theatre in Lisbon, designed by Luís Cristino da Silva in 1929 and one of the first works of modern architecture in Portugal, and the Coliseu Cinema-Theatre by Cassiano Branco, built in Porto in 1939, with a design between party walls and an art deco aesthetic.

The Splendour of Film and Cinemas

On the heels of this superb beginning, in the post-war period in Spain and under the rule of Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, cinema’s indisputable popularity meant that it occupied the most desirable areas along the avenues of cities both large and small. In the 1950s and ’60s cinemas colonized neighbourhoods across Spain. They occupied ground-floor commercial spaces and the courtyards of residential buildings. Between 1930 and 1970, there were some 160 cinemas in Madrid, over 100 in Barcelona, and more than 40 in Valladolid. The most brilliant of these cinemas were designed by architects such as Felipe López Delgado, Luis Gutiérrez Soto, Luis María Martínez-Feduchi, Casto Fernández-Shaw, Pedro Muguruza, Cassiano Branco, Artur Andrade, Luís Cristino da Silva, Francisco de Asís Cabrero, Miguel Fisac, Julio Cano Lasso and Antonio Fernández Alba, among others.

Decadence

Cinemas were incorporated, either introduced into existing buildings or built independently, as an unquestionable part of educational projects in schools, universities and civic buildings. They were designed to share other uses with event halls, theatres or chapels, but films were screened there weekly, making them into modern spaces inhabited by celluloid dreams. With the popularization of television, the fall in the numbers of spectators in cinemas forced a change in format. Small theatres were replaced by or transformed into multiplexes in the 1980s, and then tucked away inside large shopping centres in the 1990s. Today, with some exceptions, all that remains of the old cinemas are their envelopes, reminding us of the architectural language that lingers in casinos, hardware stores, supermarkets, fashion boutiques, nightclubs, gyms or banks, etc., – anything goes. Taking a look at these buildings included in the Iberian Docomomo Register lets us enjoy them as we learn more about them. At the same time, it exposes, tinged with a certain nostalgia or grief, the sad end of many of these of works of modern architecture that, like the films that were shown there, captivated multiple generations.

• In depth Modern Cinema Architecture on the Iberian Peninsula