Cine Capitol: Seven Letters for a Vanished Auditorium

The site comes from a construction project. When Plaza Emilio Castelar, today’s Plaza del Ayuntamiento, was remodeled and enlarged, the works affected several lots. On one of them, the Valencian architect Joaquín Rieta designed a movie theater squeezed between two buildings in 1930.

Outside, brick covers the whole wall. There are two kinds, a reddish one and a pale one, and the Valencia College of Architects recognizes both Neo-Mudéjar and the Amsterdam School in it. Above the canopy, twelve small-paned windows line up in two rows within a gray grid. Higher up, eight square openings sink into their frames. The cornice is cut into steps.

Two towers hold the edges. They answer each other, pale, striped with red lines from bottom to top, and end in crenellations. Their windows are narrow. Each one housed a staircase, and the audience climbed it to the different levels of the auditorium.

Art Deco was mostly that auditorium. Amadeo Roca and the brothers Arturo and Ricardo Boix had designed its decor: geometric forms fitted into the architecture. This taste had arrived through magazines, to which Rieta subscribed, and through the French and American films that were screened there. A renovation in the 1970s devastated that decor.

The name, though, stayed on the wall. CAPITOL is spelled out in the middle of the reddish brick in seven dark letters, cut at right angles: the O is a rectangle pierced by a small square. On each side, stepped lines of brick frame them. This geometric lettering, together with the glazed gallery below, gives the façade its share of Art Deco.

The theater closed for good in 1996. The building went over to shops and offices. The façade was kept whole, protected along with the first bay. Behind it, the rest was replaced by a new construction. The auditorium tuned to the audience’s gaze no longer exists.