Cinema Ideal regains its cultural activity thanks to the intervention of José Neves, who focuses on the modifications that increase the quality of the building with ordinary materials and usually on the already existing elements in the cinema.
The intervention should be little intrusive, respecting the aspects that the pass of time has left on the building. The cinema also turns outward to the city, of whom it should be an interactive part, in an attempt to return the urban character of the cinema architectural type.
Description of the project by José Neves
Cinema Ideal was the first cinema in Portugal. Located in the heart of Lisbon, between Loreto and Horta Seca streets, it occupies the ground floor of two buildings built in two different epochs - 19th and 20th centuries. Since its inauguration in 1904, the cinema was transformed by multiple interventions, becoming a degraded and architecturally disqualified place, showing exclusively pornographic films during the last three decades.
The project was based on three fundamental principles:
1. To recover the original urban nature of Cinema Ideal, opposed to the character of almost all of today's cinemas in Lisbon which are located inside shopping malls.
2. To accept and integrate the traces of different interventions over time, giving it a new unity.
3. To give the screening room an architectural identity: a boîte à miracles instead of an indistinct black box.
Therefore, the entrance was reconfigured, opening the cinema space to the city and bringing the limestone of the streets of Lisbon to the inside. In the foyer, of exiguous dimensions, the walls extend the asymmetric and undulating surfaces of the screening room and a three faced mirror reflects the light and the movement from the street in the interior space. In the screening room, the most valuable existent elements that remained were also integrated in the project: the stalls and balcony, the undulated folded walls and its texture. The plaster of the walls, the wood-fibers and cement, used in the ceilings - all painted in a single nightly color - and the natural cork that dresses the floors are the only materials, along with a few elements made of mirror and stone.
Together with the quality of the film programming carried out by the promoter, the project is a gesture of resistance to crisis that Portugal is going through, not only social and economic, but also cultural. In this sense, the richness of Cinema Ideal does not depend on the wealth and ostentation that is historically associated with the architecture of movie theatres. In every step, we are reminded of the words - more opportune than ever - of both Vítor Figueiredo, the architect, and Jean-Marie Straub, the filmmaker:
"Take everything from us, but luxury!”
