Projects

The Arnau Theatre: living memory of the Paral·lel.
The Arnau Theatre is a unique architectural vestige of a time when leisure was experienced as a prize won over the routines and difficulties of everyday working life. Crossing its doors and entering the world of the theatre must have been of a special emotional quality. This excitement, this ritual of magic, illusion and respect for artistic expression is about to become once again a reality in Barcelona.

The Arnau Theatre will be able to show what it used to be: a popular theatre with all its dignity and personality, welcoming, simple, warm and magical, transpiring memory and with an ambition of unquestionable artistic and cultural quality.

Preservation of spaces, deconstruction and recuperation of elements.
The new Arnau Theatre will contain the traces of time and collective memory from all the different historical periods the theatre has gone through.
The many elements found in the building – floor tiles, doors, windows with coloured glasses, furniture, staircases – will be carefully catalogued with the aim of reusing them in the new construction. The new functional program will be incorporated into existing spaces of similar spatial characteristics and proportions. The new program adapts itself to the existing situation and not the other way around.

The functioning of the building is divided into a public and a technical area. The public area, located behind the front facade of the theatre, is connected by a new vertical nucleus of communications that organises the different parts of the public programme: Theatre, Club, offices, rehearsal rooms, Interpretation centre and an open-air theatre on the roof.
The technical area is accessed through a historical passage currently in disuse. Thanks to the theatre’s new activity, the passage will be open again to the city becoming the access point and space for the circulation of technicians and actors, and a place to take a rest in between performances.