OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture Ellen van Loon   United Kingdom   In more than 13,000 square meters, the new cultural venue for Factory International – the institution that  organizes the Manchester International Festival every two years – is designed to accommodate all kinds of performing arts. 

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   France   The deep meaning of the concept of ‘building the city’ lies in the ability to generate public space. While the public nature of a place is essentially a consequence of its citizens’ activity, the architect’s responsibility is to create the conditions

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture Ellen van Loon   United Kingdom   The new headquarters of Factory International, organizer of the Manchester International Festival (MIF), has been completed. A work of OMA / Ellen van Loon, it responds to an eclectic environment – amid industrial brick constructions, towers, housing

Leonardo Quinteros Nicolás Norero Tomás Villalón   Chile   This theater in Panguipulli, a small rural municipality in southern Chile, in the region of Los Ríos, rises on the shore of the glacial lake it takes its name from. On a concrete plinth containing dressing rooms and services, the volume is actually t

Matos Castillo Néstor Montenegro Toni Gelabert   Spain   The project to refurbish and convert the Casa de la Cultura de Boadilla del Monte into a new library and municipal theater involved working on a building completed in the 1980s and which housed two uses, but combined in a slightly confused way. The

O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects   United Kingdom   The character of the new center is in keeping with the industrial past of the site: walls and roofs are clad in brick and big tiles made of clay in the same tone. The steps and chamfers form the entrances and articulate the building...

Carmody Groarke   Germany   A cylindrical pavilion clad in folded aluminum sheets gives ancillary service to the world’s only theater found on the premises of a fully operating daily market of fresh food produce. Facing the brutalist hangar designed by Hermkes that now includes

Pierre Yovanovitch   Switzerland   The young Victor Hugo who in 1832 was forbidden to stage Le roi s’amuse under the pretext of lèse-majesté could not have imagined that twenty years later, people would be singing his verses set to music on the streets of Venice, London, and even Hava

Tabanlioglu Architects   Turkey   The Atatürk Cultural Center first opened in Istanbul in 1969 as the Palace of Culture, following a project drawn up by Hayati Tabanlıoğlu (1927-1994). Located on the edge of Taksim Square, the building partly burned down two years after its inaugura

Estudio Segui, arquitectura y planeamiento Pereira-Royo Arquitectos   Spain   The team formed by Pereira-Royo and Estudio Seguí, in collaboration with the consulting firm García Diéguez, has won the competition to enlarge the Bretón de los Herreros Theater in Logroño, capital of La Rioja region, giving it new staging facilitie

MAD Architects   China   En una ciudad conocida por su clima extremo, un espacio consagrado a las artes escénicas despliega sus sinuosas formas como si hubiese sido moldeado por los severos elementos. Como una topografía que emerge de los humedales circundantes, el centro re

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos Óscar Miguel Ares   Spain   The refurbished theater will be transformed into ‘three buildings in one,’ functioning independently or simultaneously. The obsolete spaces are recovered through strategies that pursue sustainability, social inclusion, and adaptability. The proposal

Studio FORM_A    Italy   The tripartite composition of the envelope organizes the distribution of uses within the factory. The two first floors, dedicated to theater-related activities, are integrated into the circulation routes of visitors, who become part of the performanc

Urtzi Grau Jocelyn Froimovich   Italy   The main building is designed as a prefab wood structure that permits opening up to 36 skylights on the saw-tooth roof, making sure that the spaces for theater and for culture are always adequately illuminated throughout the day...

FRPO Walk Architecture & Landscape SD Partners Architettura e Ingegneria   Italy   The Italian-Spanish team formed by FRPO Rodríguez y Oriol Arquitectos (Pablo Oriol, Fernando Rodríguez), Walk Architecture & Landscape (Juan Tur Mc Glone), and SD Partners (Massimo, Giuliani, Alessandro Viganò, Beatrice Meroni) placed first in the Ma

Tadao Ando   China   The project is an opera house in a cultural complex that is anticipated to shape the core of the cultural zone of Jiading New Town, a suburb which is developing rapidly based on its car industry, and that is 30 km northwest of Shanghai. Owing to the

Vector Architects   China   On a slope of the Yanshan Mountains in northern China, at one end of the east-west axis that crosses Beijing, the theater rises as a material symbol of the contrast between the sinuous natural landscape and the vast open urban setting of the city. Th

Vector Architects   China   The broad program – museum, cultural center, market, and open-air theater – is addressed through a decentralized scheme, with a promenade linking the buildings and stretching through the entire site, from the square below to the roof garden...

FRES Architectes   Switzerland   Working out of offices in Paris and Geneva, the firm headed by Laurent Gravier and Sara Martín Cámara, FRES Architects, won the 2009 competition for a theater in Geneva. The complex features two auditoriums plus drama production workshops. These were

Flores & Prats   United Kingdom   The new auditorium is placed underground, conceived as a large foyer where the building’s horizontal connections converge. The character of the intervention is marked by the preservation of the three historical facades and the existing vaults...

Flores & Prats   Spain   The Arnau refurbishment project aims to turn the old theater into a contemporary venue fit out with new technical innovations, but also to recover its emblematic cafés and decorated halls evocative of past times and of a way of understanding culture.

K architectures Sigwalt Herman   France   The French city of Béziers was founded around 700 B.C. and went through different periods in which it was occupied by Gauls and Romans, who contributed to forming its identity. Carried out by K architectures, the Paris practice of Karine Herman and J

Snøhetta   Germany   Located in the heart of Düsseldorf, this mixed-use development commissioned to the firm Snøhetta presents two towers containing offices, apartments, and a hotel, and includes a new opera house for the city. Named Duett Düsseldorf, the new cultural sp

The stage designs by the Galician artist break the molds of conventional realist theater and blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. The striking color combinations that compose her scenes seek to visually impact the spectator.

The Madrid partners Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano, in collaboration with the Parisian firm Marin+Trottin, finished first in the bid to design the Cité du Théâtre in Paris, carrying the day over the other two finalists, Foster+Partners and Fabr

In the context of its internationalization process the Norwegian firm Snøhetta recently won the competition for a theater building in Xingtai, one of China’s oldest but also fastest growing cities. The project is organized around a large reflective p

Seven years after winning the competition that was held for the purpose, the Chilean trio of architects composed of Smiljan Radic, Eduardo Castillo, and Gabriela Medrano has been able to inaugurate the Biobío Regional Theater in the city of Concepció

Una pequeña isla sintética dentro de un océano verde: tal es el carácter del Teatro Suramericana, ubicado en el corazón del Jardín Botánico de Medellín y diseñado por Emerson Marín. Mediante un amplio escenario al aire libre y un muro vegetal que hac

Dentro del programa de desarrollo cultural propuesto por Mohamed VI, el estudio de Zaha Hadid ha recibido el encargo de diseñar el Gran Teatro de Rabat. El edificio ocupará un lugar icónico a orillas del río Bouregreg en la capital marroquí, y se con

En noviembre de este año, coincidiendo con los Juegos Asiáticos Cantón 2010, está prevista la inauguración del Teatro de la Ópera de Guang­zhou última obra de Zaha Hadid en Asia. La antigua Cantón es hoy la ciudad más importante del sur de China y co

El estudio holandés Mecanoo, dirigido por Francine Houben, ha iniciado recientemente las obras del que será el mayor espacio teatral de Asia, el Centro de Artes Escénicas Wei-Wu-Ying en Kaohsiung, con 1,5 millones de habitantes la segunda ciudad de T

En 2002 cayó, víctima de aluminosis, el teatro Atlántida de Vic; ocho años después, Josep Llinás, Josep Llobet, Pedro Ayesta y Laia Vives han terminado el nuevo conjunto que lo sustituye, bautizado como Centro de Artes Escénicas de Osona, la comarca

En un entorno de callejuelas y pequeñas plazas, rodeado por un caserío irregular, el teatro municipal de Zafra, al sur de Badajoz, está inmerso en el espacio intermedio donde la trama del centro histórico confluye con las nuevas áreas de expansión.

En su décima edición, la Bienal Española de Arquitectura y Urbanismo ha otorgado a los Teatros del Canal, obra de Juan Navarro Baldeweg en Madrid (véase AV 135-136), el premio de Arquitectura. En las demás categorías han resultado ganadores el Hotel

El estudio danés Lundgaard y Tranberg ha completado el Teatro Real en el puerto de Copenhague: un volumen de fuerte entidad geométrica volcado al mar gracias a la pasarela de madera que permite a los paseantes caminar por encima del agua y al gran ve

A principios de 2009 dará comienzo la temporada regular del Teatro del Canal, recientemente inaugurado. Desde que el Canal de Isabel II —centenaria empresa pública responsable de la gestión del agua en Madrid— lanzase en 2000 un concurso internaciona

Justo Isasi   ¿Qué hacer con los viejos cines? ¿Remodelar, derribar, embalsamar? Son preguntas que siguen siendo actuales y que pasaron a ser populares precisamente cuando el propio cine se hizo cargo de la cuestión en películas como Cinema Paradiso. En nuestro ca

Ángel Luis Fernández   Como un capítulo más de la continua aportación de espacios de uso cultural que las administraciones públicas vienen impulsando, nos llega ahora la creación de un nuevo enclave para la investigación y la representación de las artes escénicas y de la d

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The reconstruction of Barcelona’s Liceo is an indicator of the Catalonian cultural climate, and of the difficulty of reconciling the tradition with the new.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Moneo’s rigorous auditorium stands before Bofill’s jovial theater in an area of Barcelona that wishes to define itself through cultural buildings.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Esta instalación es una representación: no pertenece al ámbito de las artes plásticas, sino al del teatro. Su título no es, como equívocamente señala la ficha técnica, La furia de los santos: en realidad se denomina La pasión de los santos. Y sus fig

lago Pericot   Una sociedad que intenta curar a sus individuos, pero que los elimina al llegar a irrecuperables; niños-chips alimentados por ordenadores y que matan con tanques teledirigidos; virus apocalípticos que se propagan por el ruido, por el exceso de decibe