A placing new cinema glows inside Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum

A defining trait of the Reina Sofia Museum is its beguiling conflux of architectural kinds. A key pillar of Madrid’s artwork mile, it occupies the bones of an 18th-century hospital designed by José de Hermosilla and Francisco Sabatini, formative figures within the metropolis’s neoclassical cloth. The museum’s opening in 1990 adopted an in depth renovation formed by a number of practices, with its later enlargement – and most recognisable kind – realised by way of the contextual imaginative and prescient of Jean Nouvel.

The brand new cinema at Reina Sofia Museum

The fashionable and modern artwork museum’s architectural legacy continues to evolve, its subsequent chapter marked by the transformation of a former auditorium, in-built 1987 by Jaume Bach with Gabriel Mora, into an enclave dedicated to audiovisual arts.

Bach now revisits the venture alongside Anna and Eugeni Bach, dreaming up a brand new cinema and auditorium that conjure the visible sensibilities of cinematic worlds starting from Luis Buñuel to David Lynch, and from Pedro Almodóvar to Aki Kaurismäki. It additionally nods to the legacy of the neighbouring Cine Doré and Stockholm’s Bio Skandia.

Located inside the Sabatini constructing, Bach sought to protect the venue’s singular character. The beneficiant vaulted entrance corridor retains a preserved serliana that conceals a triangular projection hub framed by velvet curtains. The previous hospital home windows have been closed with wood panels, their carved raindrop motifs providing a tactile distinction to the overarching pink palette.

The screening room transitions into deeper blue tones to stop reflections. Right here, the 133-seat space has been reconfigured to extend the slope and enhance sightlines to the display, whereas the emblematic suspended triangle has been reimagined as a big acoustic display concealing the central audio system.

‘The blue of the sky and the pink of the carpet recall classical theatres, establishing a hyperlink between the operate of the house and the custom of cinema, particularly since it’s positioned in a neoclassical constructing,’ says Bach.