Modern Cinemas: The Spaces That Made Us Dream1
The birth of a new architectural aesthetic, the image of cinemas prior to the modern movement and the origins of a typology
In its early days, during the first decade of the 20th century, the emergence of the new architecture for cinemas was “led” by art nouveau. The image of these new spaces was dominated by that aesthetic largely thanks to the dissemination resulting from the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. As for the antecedents on the Iberian Peninsula, it is worth pointing out some of the cinemas designed in the early International Style, prior to the emergence of the modern movement. Examples include the Diorama Cinema by Salvador Alarma in Barcelona, from 1902; the second Pabellón Lino in La Coruña, from 1906; the Salón Pradera in Santander, from 1906, designed by Vicente Ramón Lavín Casalín; the Pabellón Pradera in Valladolid, from 1908;2 and Rossio’s Animatograph in Lisbon, part of the Portuguese Arte Nova, from 1907.
These buildings show how efforts were made to give the first cinemas an identity of their own – distanced from the historicism and eclecticism seen in 19th-century theatres. From the beginning, innovation in cinematographic technique went hand in hand with architectural innovation, and this was also true for the antecedents of the modern movement. Examples include the expressionism of cinemas in Berlin, such as Hans Poelzig’s Capitol Cinema from 1924 and the Universum Cinema by Erich Mendelsohn from 1926, and the cubism of Mallet-Stevens’ cinema for the Cité Moderne from 1924 or Theo van Doesburg’s De stijl for his cinema-dance hall Café L’Aubette in Strasbourg, from 1926.3 Starting in 1925, the different experiments from the architecture of the modern movement begin to appear in the designs for cinemas.
The La Scala Cinema in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, follows a somewhat different path from the observations above. In 1916, in neutral Switzerland during the Great War, Charles Édouard Jeanneret – before he was called Le Corbusier – a young architect who was not yet 29 years old, built one of the first buildings in Europe exclusively dedicated to screening films. The project sparked a certain controversy over the authorship of its façade, which people associated with works by Schinkel or Palladio. Looking at the floor plans and setting aside an analysis of the façade, the typology of the elements and their organization in the interior are what make this design a fundamental reference. Today, even without knowing if there were any antecedents, we can assert that Le Corbusier established a typological starting point with his design of a space for watching films that remained in force for over half a century: the dark, rectangular box, with sloped floor seating and, above it, against the back wall, an overhanging balcony section with a steeper slope, both sections with independent access points and with seats in parallel rows facing the screen, was his first Boîte à Miracles. The result was a new architectural type with those features as constants and an “industrial warehouse” structure inserted into a lightless box to generate a space like a cinema variété.4
The First, Modest Rationalist and Art Deco Cinemas on the Peninsula
To a large extent, since the beginnings of the modern movement in 1925, architecture for cinemas continued to reinterpret the typology tested in 1916 in the La Scala cinema. This typology was adapted to cinemas both large and small, both free-standing buildings and buildings between party walls, and even on corners; several examples of this type appeared in the early years of modern architecture. A review of the Docomomo Ibérico Register reveals several of these cinemas from the first decade of the modern movement, cut short in Spain in 1936 due to the start of the Civil War and in Portugal during the military dictatorship, between 1926 and the Salazar dictatorship of 1933.
The buildings from those early years, sober in appearance, became points of reference in their cities, including the Victoria de Monzón in Huesca; the Ordizia in Guipúzcoa; the Palacio in Getafe, Madrid; the Torcal Cinema-Theatre in Antequera, Málaga; the Tívoli in Andújar, Jaén; and the Novedades in Miranda de Ebro, which were pioneers in offering this new form of entertainment. They are proof of the success of cinemas across the peninsula. Hundreds of cinemas were built in both mid-sized and small cities – an indication of the development of the film industry and, at the same time, the evolution of modern architecture, following the same typology of the La Scala.
For his Victoria Cinema, which was restored and reopened in 2020, Monzón designed the façade using a rationalist language in a dialogue with domestic elements, a gallery and balconies where the overhang forms a canopy that shelters the double entrance to the lobby, finishing off the composition with three round windows. Using a similar language, Domingo Unanue provided the Ordizia Cinema, from 1927, now called the Herri Antzokia popular theatre, with a characteristic volume, closing the corner with a curved balcony, and ending the main volume with a continuous horizontal window following the curve of the corner. The Palacio Cinema in Getafe – called the Alba during the design phase and the only one without a balcony section – suffered a worse fate and is no longer. Designed by Antonio Sala in 1935, it had a capacity for 750 spectators in the floor seating, facing a screen that was set between two round windows in the back wall. Small windows were opened at the level of the projection room in the plaster façade, which had a stepped symmetry like a factory building to hide the gabled roof. Maintaining a rationalist language, the windows on the main floors were set into a horizontal belt of mixed brick also laid in horizontal strips. In the 1932 design for the Torcal Cinema-Theatre, located on a very long plot of land in Antequera, the architect, Antonio Sánchez Esteve created a volume in front of the theatre, with a terrace above the lobby, between two stairways that served as an entrance to the balcony section and an access to the elongated bar on the terrace. The rationalist volume included striated horizontal elements on the outside and at the top of the theatre, formalisms that connected with an Art Deco language that coincided with the aesthetics of the moment in cars and domestic appliances. Following the Decorative Arts Exhibition of 1925 in Paris and some of the projects seen there, such as the Tourism Pavilion by Robert Mallet-Stevens, this aesthetic began to spread more broadly and had an important influence on cinema architecture. For the Tívoli Cinema in Andújar, from 1933, Francisco Alzado applied this same Art Deco language to the curved volumes of the façade, accompanied by narrow, striated horizontal windows, curves that were repeated in the theatre as a frame for the screen and in the parapets of the balcony section. To round out the panorama of these first modern cinemas, it is worth highlighting the Cine Novedades in Miranda de Ebro, where, fortunately, the original use has been maintained into the present.5 In 1931, the architect Fermín Álamo designed the façade with a domestic reference: a glazed gallery jutting out that still hangs above the entrance to the lobby, a space occupied in its centre by the staircase, in a single flight, providing access to the balcony section, visible from the galleries with their curved outline. The aesthetics inside the theatre are also Art Deco, seen in the curves of the drop ceiling and the forms of the balcony overhang.
In several of these cinemas, like the latter in Miranda de Ebro and the former ones that have a balcony section, the building crowns took the form of a wave – a shape that is echoed in the tiers of seats, and even in the balcony sections that are curved at the ends or extending outward toward the screen. In our opinion, these forms pay tribute, in part, to the theatre typology and its different levels of boxes and galleries that surround the orchestra level, wrapping around it in a horseshoe shape. It is no coincidence that many of these cinemas shared, and still share, their uses with live theatre, where the proscenium around the screen served as a stage.
These same references, in terms of image and typology, from the small cinemas designed through 1936 can be seen on a larger scale in big cinemas in cities like Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, and Oporto, or in mid-sized cities such as Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Cádiz, Valencia, Valladolid, Oviedo or Palencia.
The Grand Cinemas of Early Modernity in the Golden Age, 1925-1936
Two major cinemas came into being with modernity in Lisbon and Madrid. The first in 1925, the Capitólio Cinema-Theatre by Luis Cristino da Silva and, the second, in 1930, the Fígaro Cinema-Theatre by Felipe López Delgado.6 Both reflect the doubts that hovered over the fate of the new film industry in those years, immersed in one of its greatest crises – the transition from silent films to the sound era – compared to the stability of the theatre. The investors in the Capitólio opted for a mixed building: a theatre and a cinema, along with a brewery, a combination that was unprecedented at the time. It maintained the typology of the La Scala cinema: an isolated box with a façade measuring 20 meters wide, 25 meters deep and 10 meters high, using a structure that had never been associated with non-industrial uses, consisting of a framework of pillars and beams in reinforced concrete. The building, with its initial volume now restored, reveals its rationalism, in our opinion aligned with the Art Deco of Mallet-Stevens, and, above all, the cubism of his cinema for the Cité Moderne from a year earlier, in 1924, with the “stem” on the building’s “bow”. The construction of the Fígaro Cinema-Theatre in Madrid presented more problems for its architect: initially designed for film screenings, and thus lacking a stage or dressing rooms – a more fitting name might have been Modern Cinema – eight months after the start of construction, the owner, the pelota player Anabitarte, reoriented its use to include other kinds of plays and variety shows. Because of the difficulty of fitting the building between party walls, the architect was forced to eliminate the first few rows of seats to create a small stage, opening a gallery on two floors for the actors under the stage. Following the typology of a box-shaped theatre with a balcony section, its image incorporates a complex series of references. On the one hand, Art Deco in the interior and a certain purism in the lobby influenced by the recent work of Le Corbusier, which the architect had presented some years earlier at the Residencia de Estudiantes, and, on the other, a certain formal expressiveness similar to the work of Erich Mendelsohn. In our opinion, however, following an analysis of the initial drawings of the façade compared with the plans for Café L’Aubette, designed by Theo van Doesburg in 1926, it shows the influence of De Stijl and the formal language of neoplasticism. The year after its inauguration, López Delgado was awarded two prizes for the building: he won the second medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1932 and saw his project published in AC magazine, in issue no. 5 (1st quarter of 1932).
The cinemas in Madrid by Luis Gutiérrez Soto included in the Docomomo Register deserve their own paragraph. Additionally there is the Generalife Cinema in Granada, from 1941, by the man known as the “architect of cinemas”, and the Salamanca Cinema in Madrid by Francisco Alonso Martos, dating from 1935. Also in Madrid, the Europa and Barceló cinemas, by Gutiérrez Soto, and the Salamanca Cinema, by Alonso Martos, share a corner location, making it the centre of attention with differing approaches.7 In the first, from 1928, the Europa Cinema – now a store selling bathroom fixtures – Gutiérrez Soto begins with a rationalist language, emphasizing the top and bottom of the façade through separate bands of brick, highlighting the horizontality with a Flemish bond and a protruding row every two rows, a condition that continues along the side wall. The theatre follows the usual typology, with a sloping seating section, and, in this case, two stacked balcony sections that extend laterally towards the screen. The elongated condition of the site allowed the author to include a separate dance hall and bar on the corner, the Bar Europa, with an expressionist appearance. Finally, the windows above the entrance to the cinema are a reference to a design by Josef Albers, from 1921, for the Bauhaus Sommerfeld House. Art Deco features were also added in the interior decoration and in the formalization of the parapets on the balconies. The result is a heterodox aesthetic, fusing modern tastes with the current tastes of the moment. Much more radical was the Barceló Cinema, built two years later, in 1930. On a corner lot with a rhomboid floor plan, the architect designed an event hall on two underground levels and a double-height dance hall under the cinema and with its floor seating and balcony. On the roof, there is an open-air theatre with its own raised seating section. The three halls, the dance hall in the basement, and the two cinemas, inside and on the roof, are ovaloid in shape following the diagonal of the corner that is marked on the outside by a “stem”. Here, the architect combined the different languages and unified the expression of the elements of the curved “prow” of the building using expressionist, rationalist and Art Deco references. It is, without a doubt, his best cinema design. In the project for the Salamanca Cinema, from five years later, in 1935, Alonso Martos repeated this symmetrical play of the oval-shaped hall and seating area following the diagonal of the corner, with an added “theatrical” gallery shaped like a horseshoe. Although there are certain Art Deco gestures in the canopy, the lobby and the theatre, the exterior displays a contained rationalism, with horizontal bands, countering the interior symmetry by setting back the façade on calle Conde de Peñalver. In that same year, 1935, Gutiérrez Soto, together with Pedro Muguruza, reused this oval solution for the cinema in the Pasaje del Complejo Carlos III. In our opinion, the common point of reference for these four cinemas, judging from the oval spaces, is Walter Gropius’s Total Theatre, designed in 1927 for the director and producer Erwin Piscator, which is an oval in plan and section. Contrasting with that kind of enveloping space, a final cinema in the Register by Gutiérrez Soto shows a variation in the original type of rectangular theatre. It is the Generalife Cinema, from 1941, in Granada, now a nightclub. It was designed for a complex, saw-toothed site between party walls, whose shape translated into a trapezoidal theatre – which we call a “wedge” – with a raked floor section and balcony seating, deforming the usual rectangular floor plan into a fan shape facing the screen. On the façade, which is located on a narrow street facing the headquarters of the Prosecutor’s Office – a building that is set back in the centre – Gutiérrez Soto offers a similar response by setting back the tall volume between the two wings that frame the entrance.
Following this recap of the final cinemas on this simplified list of modern cinemas from the peninsula, the discussion should focus not only on the diversity of the different languages associated with the modern movement or their juxtaposed relationships (we might call them interferences) but also on the typological questions raised by the different floor plan solutions. There is a total coincidence in the layout of the cinemas in section, with balcony seating at the back of the theatre – in one or two levels, depending on the cinema’s capacity. Smaller cinemas, without a balcony section or only with small mezzanines adjacent to the projection room, only appeared more widely beginning in the 1950s onwards in small neighbourhood cinemas or in theatres in educational or civic buildings.
Following this double reading, the Municipal Cinema, today the Centro Integral de la Mujer, designed in 1930 by Antonio Sánchez Esteve, Manuel Fernández-Pujol and Rafael Hidalgo y Alcalá del Olmo for an unusual plot of land in Cádiz, anticipated the wedge-shaped plan with its raked seating and two balcony levels, placing the main body of the lobby and service spaces in front of the theatre, a formal structure that takes its cues from domestic architecture, and employing a simple Art Deco language on the façade and inside the theatre. Showing a similar connection to Art Deco, in 1935 Luis Carlón designed the Ortega Cinema in Palencia,8 taking advantage of the corner and making it curved to add an expressionist touch and to install the lettering with the building’s name, CINE ORTEGA CINE, above it. Inside, he opted for a unique layout, with a theatre that was arched towards the screen under the oval balcony section. An even more original response is that of Cayetano Borso for the Rialto Cinema, now Filmoteca de Valencia, also from 1935, where an Art Deco tower and cornices dominate the façade that encloses the lobby, the restaurant, and the complex ascent to reach the two balcony levels. Given the unusual nature of the site, the architect fit the heart-shaped seating area to face the screen, a solution undoubtedly influenced by Johannes Duiker’s proposal for the Cineac Cinema in Amsterdam, from 1934, with a single balcony section. In the same period, however, other architects maintained the rectangular typology for the theatre. This was the case for the Baudet Cinema-Theatre in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, from 1935, by José Enrique Marrero, with its rationalist façade, symmetrical on both sides around a central “stem”. Another example is the Cine Roxy, from 1936, in Valladolid,9 now Casino Roxy, where the architect, Pérez Lozano, was influenced by the Art Deco aesthetic in dialogue with a modernity tinged with mechanist references, with even a hint of the Bauhaus in its windows.
Cinemas Integrated into Buildings
Today, the Capitol Cinema in Madrid, the most emblematic of the 60 buildings included in the Docomomo Ibérico Register, continues to fascinate. A veritable legend among “super premiere” theatres, it is located in a building, the Carrión building, that became a symbol of 20th-century Madrid. It was designed in 1931 by Luis Martínez-Feduchi and Vicente Eced, following a competition with participation from architects such as Pedro Muguruza, Luis Gutiérrez Soto, Manuel Cárdenas, Eduardo de Garay, Zabaleta, etc.10 The 16-story building houses multiple uses, from restaurants to hotels, apartments, offices, etc., and a cinema. The corner was associated with an Art Deco volume, generating an architectural bow, leaving the image of the cinema for the Gran Vía, as the main interior use. It was designed following the typology of a wedge-shaped theatre, superimposing two levels of balcony seating in an over-the-top display of Art Deco forms, both in the entrance and the lobby, the theatre, the ceilings, the bars and in the furniture, with its entire volume housed within the multi-use building. The design gave rise to the emergence of a new cinema typology: theatres housed in buildings with other uses, in which their relationship to the main use, generally residential, is secondary. In most cases, the cinema’s façade appears only on the commercial ground floor, or facing a gallery, and the volume of the theatre extends in section into the interior courtyard. One example is the cinema in the Coliseum Building, from 1931, designed by Casto Fernández-Shaw and Pedro Muguruza, also on the Gran Vía in Madrid – another Art Deco cinema with two levels of balcony seating. Of this same type is the cinema in the Astoria building, now the Club Astoria, built in Barcelona in 1933. It preserves elements of the original interior in the bar under the proscenium around the screen, which Rodríguez Arias designed using curved Art Deco forms, in the balcony overhang, and in the ceiling decorations, an aesthetic that had already been picked up by cinemas. Strangely enough, all this is set behind a building with a Bauhaus façade. The Aramo Cinema designed by Rodríguez Bustelo and Somolinos Cuesta in 1935, maintains the same solution in Oviedo in an entirely Art Deco version. In this case, the balcony seating is extended to embrace the floor seating area, like a theatre with two narrow galleries running towards the screen.
Building Cinemas between 1936 and 1939
In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, in June 1937, the plans for the Linares Rivas Cinema or the Avenida Cinema in La Coruña were finished, signed by Rafael González Villar, also following the Art Deco style and the usual typology of cinemas built in residential buildings. The war did not entail a total halt in the construction of cinemas, since films were an important tool for political and religious propaganda and cinemas were the spaces for their dissemination – especially in Galicia which played a strategic role as the rearguard during the war. In this context, in 1938, the Ortigueira Grand Cinema was built in La Coruña by Antonio Tenreiro and Peregrín Estellés, an art deco building that, although modest, uses the open space of an emergency exit courtyard to create a false corner and to allow for highlighting its location with a small tower.
Portuguese Cinemas between 1938 and 1951
There are eight cinemas in the Iberian Docomomo Register from the period when Oliveira Salazar served as prime minister of Portugal, from 1932 to 1968. They are Portuguese examples of the different types of cinemas that emerged in response to the growth of the film industry. This is the case of the building in Lisbon for the Lisboa Filme Studios, today the Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual IP, by Joaquim Bettencourt and Jorge Segurado, from 1936-1944. These cinemas also show us the different architectural languages from the period of the modern movement and their progression. In the Rosa Damasceno Cinema-Theatre, in Santarém (Marvila) from 1938, now abandoned, the architect, Amílcar Pinto, sets up a series of regular, symmetrical volumes and marks the entrance with a cylinder resting above the canopy, where subtle Art Deco references are introduced, such as the slight staggering of the windows, the geometric play of the window panes and the striations around the windows. Another magnificent example is the Cinearte Cinema, in Lisbon, now the A Barraca Theatre, designed by Raul Rodrigues in 1938 with a strident expressionism that achieves a play of volumes on the façade with just two meters of overhang, inscribing the name, CINE ARTE, in glazed lettering. An emphatic image of expressive rationalism, staggered above the void in various planes with horizontal strips of windows, it is now muffled by a backdrop of newer, taller buildings. The theatre, which adopts a language reminiscent of Art Deco, returns to the regular pattern of elongated floor seating and a balcony with symmetrical box seating above. The following two examples from Porto show quality and refinement in adapting two distinct solutions. The first, the Coliseu Cinema-Theatre, by Cassiano Branco, Chantes Siclis, Júlio de Brito and Mário de Abreu, from 1939, became the best example of Art Deco architecture in the city.Its slender aerodynamic volumes are remarkable, rounding off the façade with authority on the steep rua de Passos Manuel,11 as is the interior, with a circular solution that recalls, with good reason, Gropius’s Total Theatre, designed in 1927 – in this case, with a balcony area running in a circle around the floor seating, with a slope that becomes horizontal so it can be used as a ballroom. The second, the Batalha Cinema by Artur Andrade from 1944, provides a variation of the trapezoidal, wedge-shaped theatre, with a balcony12 and a parabolic section that improves the acoustics, similar to the geometric functionalism of Jan Duiker, specifically for the Cineac Cinema in Amsterdam from 1933. Although the interior spaces and the stairs in the Batalha can be associated with purist references, on the exterior, the composition on the corner of Praça da Batalha offers a subtle and irregular image with the characteristic fold of its curtain wall. In contrast, the Vale Formoso Cinema-Theatre, from 1934, by Francisco Granja, also in Porto, shows a symmetrical, stable image in the volume of the lobby, only set off balance by the heavy tower emerging from the central volume. Also from that same year, 1944, is the Alves Coelho Theatre by Mário de Oliveira, in Arganil, with powerful, abstract volumes, typical of a purist geometric language. In 1947, with the São Jorge Cinema in Lisbon, Fernando Silva provided a canonical response to cinemas with wedge-shaped theatres, aligning with a site sitting between two streets, with an arched entrance passing between them under the balcony area. On the exterior, however, it takes advantage of the difference in height to generate a party wall with an abstract form. The final example, from 1951, is the Virginia Cinema by Fernando Schiappa, in Santarém, which repeats the trapezoidal type, in this case with a free-standing volume that shows its typology on the outside, with a small balcony over the entrance hall that takes the form of a fan-shaped portico. In one way or another, the different organizations of the theatres are maintained, but we find that, since the Art Deco aesthetic became predominant in the 1930s, and in the examples from the 1940s and 1950s, the election is oriented towards a geometric abstraction in the architectural language.
Post-war Cinemas Housed in Other Buildings, 1940-1960
As we come to the end of this review of the cinemas included in the Iberian Docomomo Register, after the war ended in Spain there was a second phase that showed continuity with the previous one. Cinemas continued to be designed as a part of residential projects and in commercial passages. The first, the Gran Vía Cinema in Zaragoza, is located in a residential building also designed by Navarro Pérez and Navarro Anguela; it opened in 1943. It is one of the last to maintain the Art Deco style, evident in the overhang of its small balcony section and in the boxes running alongside the rectangular floor seating area, as well as the two canopies located on either side of the corner marking the double entrance, the only element that still remains as the entrance to a Burger King. Also in Zaragoza, from 1951, the Cinemas in the Pasaje Palafox, by José de Yarza and Teodoro Ríos, were designed as part of a residential building and hotel. The two independent cinemas, Palafox and Rex, with a wedge-shaped floor plan, were organized to fit together, with entrances from their own separate galleries. The larger of the two, the Palafox Cinema, has a balcony section, and the entrance is located on Paseo de la Independencia. The small Rex Cinema was designed with just one seating area with a sloping floor. As a former spectator at the Palafox in 1968, what made the most lasting impression was the ascending path through the curved space of the gallery, climbing the staircase without risers alongside the figures in the murals above a garden – a spatial sequence that is still one of its best features. In the Madrid of 1952, the interior basements of large buildings continued to be occupied by cinemas; this was the case of the Cinema in the Pasaje Mutualidad by Manuel Manzano-Monís and Manuel Muñoz, now a Mercadona supermarket. It was located in the interior, with a trapezoidal floor seating area and the main entrance off calle Fuencarral. The Novedades Cinema-Theatre was built in Barcelona in 1955 according to a design by Miquel Ponsetí. Now demolished, it was set at the back of a hotel building by Francesc Mitjans, a large cinema with a wedge-shaped theatre and rounded corners with two balcony levels. The ceiling was a meticulously studied acoustic parabola. The narrow front volume of the building was used as a hotel with six floors of rooms. It was a unique hybrid solution in Barcelona, which was repeated in 1956 in the Liceo Cinema and Bar, now Ball Centre, by Antoni de Moragas. In this case, the cinema occupied the back of a building with a curtain wall on the outside, an L-shaped building intended as a neighbourhood activity centre; the cinema sat behind a large double-height bar, with a counter 32 metres long, and with areas for tables and billiards. On the exterior, the curtain wall of the bar is topped by the opaque volume of the projection booth. The theatre is slightly wedged-shaped with the floor seating and the large balcony space housed under a stepped drop ceiling. In 1956, the residential building, cafeteria and Rex Cinema on Navarra Avenue in Soria, today a bank office, was one of the first works designed by Julio Cano Lasso. It had remained intact until a few years ago, maintaining the play of textures and colours: side walls in the trapezoidal theatre of exposed brick and wood, a white glazed canopy, Carrara marble pillars, whitewashed brick in the lobby, etc., with a variety of materials that gave it a new language, free from ornamentation and bursting with vitality and compositional contrasts.13 The Lumiere Cinema in Palma de Mallorca, from 1960, now abandoned, had a white glazed canopy that differentiated it from the image of the residential building where it was housed. The LUMIERE sign can still be read against the glazed background; inside, the basic programme was resolved by a theatre with a regular form, similar to the first projection rooms. Also in Palma de Mallorca, the last of these cinemas on the ground floor of a residential building, the Rívoli Cinema with just floor seating, was designed by Fernández Alba in 1960, three years after he earned his architecture degree. It is similar to the cinema in Soria by Cano Lasso for its interest in the combination of materials, colours and textures, with stone, terrazzo and flecked white marble against black mortar on walls and pillars, and coloured ceramic tiles for the flooring – spaces overflowing with imagination and colour that share a certain similarity with American Art Deco.
Independent Cinemas between 1940 and 1960: A Modern Eclecticism
Although to a lesser extent, cinemas were also designed during this period as independent buildings. Examples like the Bécquer, Alcázar, Avenida and Universal cinemas used languages inherited from early modernity. The Bécquer Cinema, in Seville, from 1940 and designed by Rodrigo Medina, is now a Lidl supermarket; the exterior is still standing, hidden behind a new façade. The building’s corner indicates that the architect may have admired the Dutch expressionism of Michel de Klerk, referencing Het Schip, in Amsterdam, from 1919. In Elche, Alicante, the Alcázar Cinema by Antonio Serrano, now the Disco Theatre, was designed in 1941, rigorously following the typology of floor seating with a curved balcony section above it, topped on each side by three blocks with an Art Deco profile. On the exterior, the corner shows expressionist references above the entrance, covered by a canopy that curves around under the cantilevered gallery; mechanist round windows are added, recovering an architectural language from cinemas typical of the 1930s. Also in the Avenida Cinema-Theatre, from 1943, in Santo Domingo de la Calzada (La Rioja), Agapito del Valle used references from early modernity in the façade: a convex façade with a continuous horizontal window, as a nod to the gallery from Le Corbusier’s La Roche house in Paris from 1923, including four round porthole windows, and repeating the typology of the La Scala Cinema in the interior, with the gesture of the balcony section with an Art Deco railing ending in two curved protrusions. For its part, the plans for the imposing Universal Cinema, in Madrid, designed at the end of the 1930s and now the O2 Centro Wellness gym, were signed in 1946 by Luis Labat. This would be the last to maintain references to rationalism in its brick façade, and one of the last examples of the Art Deco influence in the architectural language of cinemas.14 The floor seating and the balcony overlap, and the theatre typology does not depart from the constant features of the early days.
Starting in the 1950s, new more personal languages were developed for cinemas. This is the case of the Prendes Cinema-Theatre in Candás (Asturias), designed in 1953 by José Antonio Muñiz, and opened in 1956. It maintained the typology of a rectangular theatre with a balcony against the back wall, in total harmony with Le Corbusier’s La Scala Cinema, almost 40 years later. It consists of a regular nearly free-standing volume made of brick, only adjoined to another building along the wall behind the screen. It takes the shape of a box with rectangular brick walls highlighted with vertical striations, glazed at the entrance which, with its trapezoidal form, inverted in the lintel, recalls some expressionist window geometries. The Nuevo Iris Cinema-Theatre, in Zaragoza, designed by José de Yarza in 1953 – now the Teatro Fleta – also has certain imitations of expressionism, with triangular geometries in the façade, in the interior and even in its railings and window panes. Inside, it follows the canonical typology. These features demonstrate a certain eclecticism with formal details corresponding to an early modernity, a fact that hints at an explanation for the architectural decadence that ran parallel to the decline in this method of consuming cinema from the 1960s onwards.
In the late 1950s, the cinemas in the Register maintained the typology advanced by Le Corbusier in 1916, consisting of raked floor seating with an overhanging balcony section, and formal characteristics detached from the dependence on the Art Deco aesthetics that had persisted until the 1940s, although incorporating particularities in the application of the type with different languages. The most unique is the Felgueroso Cinema designed by Juan José Suárez in 1954 for Sama de Langreo, Asturias. An intervention from 2007 maintained the freestanding, cylindrical volume, elliptical in plan, where the original single projection room was eliminated to introduce two stacked rooms, maintaining the most unique aspect, the large original window, as a showcase, providing views of the spaces of the staircase and the lobby attached to the old balcony section. The Los Ángeles Cinema, by Francisco de Asís Cabrero in Santander, was designed in 1955 for a small, irregular corner lot, a peculiarity that is incorporated into the envelope of the lobby to ensure the volume of the theatre is almost entirely regular. The turn of the first flight of stairs and the two horizontal windows on the façade, which are further emphasized by the lines of the vertical cladding, recall purist domestic architectures. The name, Los Ángeles, was lettered in calligraphic lines of neon sitting on the split canopy above the entrance, following the slope of the second flight of stairs. A totally unique case was Miguel Fisac’s project in Valladolid for the Cinema-Theatre at the Colegio de los Padres Dominicos, now the school’s gymnasium. It was the final building in the educational complex that brought Fisac his first international success: his design for the church was awarded the Gold Medal in the 1954 Vienna Sacred Art Competition. The church organizes the entire architectural complex, including, in this case, the cinema. Fisac followed a complex design process, ultimately situating the independent volume of the cinema as the prolongation of the axis of the church, adding a small museum and concert rooms in the back in a play of harmonies with the rest of the elements in the complex – a true lesson in symmetry.15 The exterior shows the influence of Alvar Aalto’s Polytechnic University in Otaniemi from 1953. The entrance and ascending path to the balcony seating are introduced into a box with intersecting spans, and the play of spatial relationships in the interior is the converse of what we see in the church. The final modern cinema in the Register to open its doors was the Terramar Cinema in Ceuta, currently the Lili Shopping Centre. It was designed in 1960 by Jaime and José Antón-Pacheco García as a box with a square footprint, measuring half its height, from which the screen wall protrudes at the back and, on the façade, two symmetrical lateral volumes sit on either side of a large curved central plane associated with the entrance canopy. Set into the planes of this abstract composition, with strict geometric proportions (1:1 in plan, 1:2 in elevation), there are three striated rectangles made up of small windows, with proportions of 1:3 in the central section and 1:4 on the sides, and, to top it off, four horizontal windows at the height of the projection booth, also with a 1:4 ratio. Within this rigorous geometry, the wedged-shaped seating area and the balcony section were drawn with staggered, curved enclosures. The main floor and the balcony, with separate ticket offices at either end of the façade, were accessed through completely independent lobbies.
Cinemas in Educational Centres and Civic Buildings
From the final years when watching films was still a social event, we found that there are at least nine cinemas in the Register that are not on the commercial circuit. Between 1954 and 1971, various educational buildings and union headquarters incorporated spaces to watch films. Although their programming was not daily, but rather weekly, and at reduced prices aimed at students or union members, these cinemas became competitors in an industry that, at the time, was beginning to decline. They were also used as theatres or assembly halls, although they maintained their function as cinemas more consistently with screenings of film series, and their auditoriums had more seats than some of the public cinemas. Many were inside buildings, without any identifying external traits. The following are five examples contained in the Iberian Docomomo Register. In Valladolid – declared a City of Film by UNESCO in 2019 – the Cinema at the Colegio Mayor La Salle, designed by Pedro Ispizua, dates back to 1954. Hidden in the semi-basement, it still conserves a small theatre with two galleries and more than 250 seats. Also in the Register, from 1956, is the Cinema at the Centro Cultural Vallisoletano by Julio González, outfitted with a projector purchased from the legendary Cine Pradera, which held open afternoon sessions on weekends. With more than 500 numbered seats, it is an impressive space with a section of floor seating and a balcony covered by a drop ceiling reminiscent of Alvar Aalto’s Viipuri Library. Dating from 1959 are the Cinema in the Edificio de Sindicatos [Union Building], by Julio González, and the Cinema at the Colegio San Agustín, by Cecilio Sánchez-Robles, designed for the semi-basement under a church, with more than 1,000 seats. A final example of this type is the 1971 Cinema at the Escuela de Ingeniería Técnica Industrial with seating for 234 spectators.16
In terms of buildings within a larger complex but with their own volumes, it is worth mentioning, in Gijón, the Cinema at the Hogar del Productor de Ceares designed by Miguel Díaz, from 1957, and, in Madrid, the Cinema at the Instituto Nacional de Educación Física (INEF), by Javier Barroso, from 1964. Other cinemas with their own volumes and styles and entrances that are independent from the broader architectural complex, such as those in Valladolid (Villalobos 2020), include the Cinema at the Casa Cuna, now a community centre, by Ángel Ríos and Isaías Paredes from 1968, derived from a brutalist composition, or the Cinema at the Colegio Juan XXIII, by Julián Aguado and Luis Aníbarro, the final cinema included in the Iberian Docomomo Register. These cinemas were designed as theatres with raked floor seating and small balconies, but that were hardly ever used for screening films. They coincided with the end of the dream that these architectural spaces represented, anticipating by half a decade the end of the architecture of the modern movement.
Bibliography
VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel (Text and images), PÉREZ BARREIRO, Sara (Archive documentation), Arquitectura de cines en Valladolid. En busca de una identidad arquitectónica y urbana, GIRAC, UVA/Ayuntamiento de Valladolid, Valladolid, 2020.
GARCÍA BRAÑA, Celestino, GÓMEZ AGUSTÍ, Carlos, LANDROVE, Susana, PÉREZ ESCOLANO, Víctor, eds., Arquitectura del movimiento moderno en España. Revisión del Registro DOCOMOMO Ibérico, 1925-1965. Catálogo inicial de edificios del Plan Nacional de Conservación del Patrimonio Cultural del Siglo XX, / Arquitectura do Movimento Moderno em Espanha, Revisão do Regisro DOCOMOMO Ibérico, 1925-1965. Catálogo inicial de edifícios do Plan Nacional de Conservación del Patrimonio Cultural del Siglo XX, Fundación DOCOMOMO Ibérico/Fundación Arquia, Barcelona, 2019.
VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, PÉREZ BARREIRO, Sara, RINCÓN BORREGO, Iván I., eds., Arquitectura de cine, Fundación DOCOMOMO Ibérico/GIRAC, UVa, Valladolid, 2016.
VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, “Cinema Scala: la primera ʽboîte à miraclesʼ de Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier´s first ʽboîte à miraclesʼ”, en Cinema and Architecture Magazine 7, año I, September 2016, pp. 6-9.
CABO VILLAVERDE, José Luis, SÁNCHEZ GARCÍA, Jesús Ángel, eds., Cines de Galicia, Conde de Fenosa Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2013.
LANDROVE BOSSUT, Susana, ed., Equipamientos II: Ocio, comercio, transporte y turismo, 1925-1965, Registro DOCOMOMO Ibérico, 1925-1965, Fundación DOCOMOMO Ibérico/Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, Barcelona, 2011.
AAVV, Veintiún edificios de arquitectura moderna en Oporto, (editing and introduction by VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel and PÉREZ BARREIRO, Sara), Departamento Teoría de la Arquitectura y Proyectos Arquitectónicos, UVA, Valladolid, 2010.
LANDROVE BOSSUT, Susana, ed., Equipamientos I: Lugares públicos y nuevos programas, 1925-1965, Registro DOCOMOMO Ibérico, 1925-1965, Fundación DOCOMOMO Ibérico/Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, Barcelona, 2010.
1 In 2010, the Recognized Research Group on Architecture and Cinema (GIRAC University of Valladolid), organized the course Fotograma 010: Curso de Arquitectura y Cine focusing on the modern architecture cinema buildings that still exist in Castilla y León and Madrid, which are included in the Iberian Docomomo Register. In 2009, the organizers of this exhibition and authors of this text, Daniel Villalobos and Sara Pérez Barreiro, developed a lecture series on “21 Modern Architecture Buildings in Porto”, including two cinemas from the Register, the Coliseo and the Batalha. In 2008, the lecture series focused on “12 Modern Architecture Buildings in Valladolid”, including the cinemas in the Colegio de los Padres Dominicos and the Instituto Núñez de Arce, both designed by Miguel Fisac. The most remarkable aspect of these three events, each held over the course various weekends, was that most of the lectures were given at the entrances to the cinemas, and inside the theatres, by researchers who are experts on each building. The course attendees, lecturers, and organizers all toured the lobbies, auditoriums, and seating areas, equipped with computers, cables, PA systems and projectors. The theatres became conference rooms, as well as the sources of the images being viewed, and the PowerPoint presentations were projected on their screens. The lectures were documented and published in various books that appear in the bibliography, several of which are available via open access on the web, and one of which was published by the Iberian Docomomo Foundation. The authors included, with the hopes of not leaving anyone out, Jorge Cunha Pimentel for the Coliseu do Porto (Porto); Alexandra Trevisán for the Batalha Cinema (Oporto); Ramón Rodríguez with Marta Úbeda for the Doré (Madrid); Daniel Villalobos for the Fígaro (Madrid), the Residencia “La Salle”, the Colegio de los Padres Dominicos, the Instituto Núñez de Arce (Valladolid), and the Cinema on Avenida Navarra (Soria); Ignacio Feduchi for the Capitol (Madrid); Alberto Julián Vigalongo for the Novedades (Miranda de Ebro); Alberto Combarros for the Ortega (Palencia); Nieves Fernández for the Roxy (Valladolid); Juan Antonio Cortés with Oscar Ares for the Barceló, Europa and Salamanca (Madrid); Miguel Lasso de la Vega for the Universal (Madrid); Sara Pérez for the Cinema at the Colegio San Agustín (Valladolid); and Iván Rincón for the Cinema in the Sindicatos building (Valladolid). The online exhibition by the Iberian Docomomo Foundation, accompanied by this text, has its origin in the existing documentation in the Register, in the works cited and in certain others that were carried out later, such as the exhibition in 2016 and the lecture series: Confluencias: Arquitectura, Cine y Ciudad, curated by Sara Pérez at the Museo Patio Herreriano, as well as the 2020 book Arquitectura de cines en Valladolid by Daniel Villalobos with Sara Pérez. It is motivated by the interest in disseminating the architectural quality contributed by the Modern Movement to cinema architecture and the importance of its typological, functional, formal and urban responses, in order to promote the preservation and understanding of what is now, in many cases, only the vestiges of this modern architecture.
2 VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel (text and images) y PÉREZ BARREIRO, Sara (archive documentation), Arquitectura de cines en Valladolid. En busca de una identidad arquitectónica y urbana. GIRAC, UVA/Ayuntamiento de Valladolid, Valladolid, 2020, pp. 30-46.
3 VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, PÉREZ BARREIRO, Sara, RINCÓN BORREGO, Iván I., eds., Arquitectura de cine, Fundación DOCOMOMO Ibérico/GIRAC, UVa, Valladolid, 2016.
4 VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, “Cinema Scala: la primera ʽboîte à miraclesʼ de Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier´s first ʽboîte à miraclesʼ”, in Cinema and Architecture Magazine 7, Ist year, septenbre 2016. D.L. AS 00497-2015, 2016, pp. 22 and following..
5 JULIÁN VIGALONGO, Alberto, “Cine Novedades (Miranda de Ebro”, in VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, PÉREZ BARREIRO, Sara, op. cit., pp. 109-113.
6 VILLALOBOS, Daniel, “Cine-Teatro Fígaro”, in Ibíd., pp. 49-63.
7 ARES ÁLVAREZ, Oscar M., “¿Qué se lleva ahora en Madrid? Reflexiones en torno a los edificios racionalistas dedicados al cine. Cines Barceló, Europa y Salamanca”, in Ibíd., pp. 139-153.
8 COMBARROS AGUADO, Alberto, “Cine Ortega (Palencia)”, in Ibíd., pp. 115-121.
9 FERNÁNDEZ VILLALOBOS, Nieves, “Cine Roxy (Valladolid)”, in Ibíd., pp. 123-137.
10 FEDUCHI BENLLIURE, Ignacio, “El edificio Carrión. El cine Capitol”, in Ibíd., pp. 65-107.
11 CUNHA PIMENTEL, Jorge, “Coliseu do Porto 1937-1941”, in AAVV, Veintiún edificios de arquitectura moderna en Oporto, Departamento Teoría de la Arquitectura y Proyectos Arquitectónicos, UVA, Valladolid, 2010, pp. 81-93.
12 TREVISAN DA SILVEIRA PACHECO, Alexandra, “Cinema Batalha. Artur Andrade 1944-1947”, in Ibíd., pp. 95-107.
13 VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, “Cine en avenida de Navarra (Soria)”, in VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, PÉREZ BARREIRO, Sara, op. cit., pp. 171-183.
14 LASSO DE LA VEGA ZAMORA, Miguel, “Antiguo Universal Cinema. Actual Centro Wellness Manuel Becerra”, in Ibíd., pp. 155-164.
15 VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, “Cine-Teatro del Colegio de los Padres Dominicos (Valladolid). Una lección de simetría”, in Ibíd., pp. 185-196.
16 VILLALOBOS ALONSO, Daniel, PÉREZ BARREIRO, Sara, Arquitectura de cines en Valladolid. En busca de una identidad arquitectónica y urbana, op. cit.
