Refurbishment of the Theatre Circus Albacete

The body of access and social relationship has been conceived as a bridge. Faced with the evident need to demolish the residential building erected in 1940, the façade of the Teatro Circo has thus become a great opportunity. Not only because it is a new construction, but also because it was always the great pending issue. Thus, the program of needs has suggested the way in which this body could be resolved. They were to house rehearsal rooms and classrooms and offices that never existed in the original proposal. Buried, the rehearsal rooms can work and the offices of the management and administration of the Theater is just that they can be arranged in an elevated position. To connect both levels, what the authors of the intervention call the "pylons" of their bridge have been erected, which, in reality, is not such, but rather a framework. A frame, even if it has the lower frame buried, to frame the main object of attention: the room. Because that framework has been wanted as diaphanous as possible, especially on the ground floor, to bring the room, the true protagonist of the performance, to the street. The other important and strong idea has been the treatment of the façade: a rabidly modern solution has been chosen, or at least its faster reading, in line with the famous high-tech. It is a kind of neutral parasol that the architects explain as a curtain. During the day, it covers everything. At night, with the interior lighting, it reveals to the city the authentic scene that is the one configured by the public with its assistance. This is how it happens as it happened before: people come to see and be seen, a not trivial matter in a provincial city that wants and does not want to stop being such.

As for the main room, the idea of ​​the intervention has been to recover, as far as possible, the original space prior to the 1919 intervention. In other words, an attempt has been made to demolish the false vaults and rescue the original arcades. that stretch between the slender cast iron columns, which, moreover, recover their initial proportion. As for the spectators, it did not seem logical to insist on the idea of ​​an Italianstyle theater (the section lacks height to accommodate a series of sufficient floors), so it is resolved in circular stands. The stalls are conceived, when necessary, as the central scene.

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