Apr
'11
Josep Lluís Mateo hands over the finished building of the new Film Theatre of Catalonia, situated in the Raval district of Barcelona.
The month of April 2011 sees the handover of the facility, designed by Josep Lluís Mateo, the new home of the Film Theatre of Catalonia, which houses two cinemas and new offices for the ICIC (Institut Català de les Industries Culturals, Catalan Institute of Cultural Industries).
“Constructing a building is often a long process.
In the summer of 2004, during the open competition phase, my initial interest was in understanding the brief and the place. We built a model with fragments of what the project was to contain, with no specific attempt to give form or unity. We arranged this conglomerate at a tangent to one of the sides of the site, constructing a street and freeing up a plaza in front of it.
The next phase, the invited competition in autumn 2004, obviously required precision. The cinemas, a very important part of the project, were put in the basement to reduce the volumetric impact of the building.
The context then became stronger: the plaza became the entire ground floor, and the material for its construction had to be concrete, uniting structure and finish in a continuous mass which, to me, seemed to establish a relation with the shabby, dilapidated masses of its neighbours.
It is a public building that configures the plaza it borders. It is designed to underline differences in order to establish an affectionate relationship with its shabby old neighbours and dissociate itself from the presences of its contemporaries.
During the design development phase in 2005, contact with the client was ongoing. One result was a vertical spatial axis that runs through the building to draw light and space into its movement.
The construction phase, from 2007 to 2011, is extremely complex, having started with a long archaeological dig and continuing with all the excavation and work involved in undergrounding the cinemas, a difficult task because the site is set in a former medieval lagoon.
A building is always the expression of intelligence and sustained will brought to bear on a specific place. We cannot abandon the project to its fate. We have to accompany it until the idea, converted into matter and space, starts living its life.
Then, we disappear; the building no longer belongs to us.”
Josep Lluís Mateo, 2009
Photos: Adrià Goula
See more about the Film Theatre here.
