Thematic file

Memento-SCALA

Thematic Dossiers

MEMENTO-SCALA

Text: Dan MARIN

Cinematography is one of the programs associated in the highest degree with the "new world" and with the modern architecture of the 1920-1930s, a symbolic link given by the fact that film operated, by its very nature, with categories fundamentally attached to the ideals of modernism - movement, space, light - but also factual, represented by the projects of important names in German expressionist architecture, such as Bruno Taut (Kino Palast, 1920, unrealized), Hans Poelzig (Capitol am Zoo, 1924), Erich Mendelsohn (Universum, 1927) and, last but not least, Rudolf Fränkel (Lichtburg, 1928).
The construction in 1937 of the Scala cinema in Bucharest combined both meanings, reconfirming the vocation and reinforcing the modernist character of the Bulevard Magheru on the one hand, and marking one of the most significant moments of Rudolf Fränkel's international career on the other.

In the summer of 1933, Rudolf Fränkel left Germany to settle in Bucharest, in search of a safer and, as far as possible, more favorable place to continue his professional practice, which he had begun in 1924 in Berlin. He would remain here until 1937, before moving to England and then to the United States, where he would settle permanently in ^1950-19501.

Scala building and cinema: ground floor plan and 2nd floor plan

I. Fränkel had trained as an architect and had worked extensively during the years of the Weimar Republic, a period in which, in contrast to the acute precariousness of the economic and social situation, German cultural life - and especially Berlin's - was characterized by exceptional diversity and vitality.
In architecture, alongside the older, traditional, classicizing or regionalist line, in the immediate post-war years, what was generically called Neues ^Bauen2, the avant-garde direction, oriented towards a practical, constructive and social understanding of architecture and articulated around the expressionism/rationalism polarity, appeared and developed throughout the following decade. A complex landscape, with oppositions - artistic vs. technical, humanism vs. mechanization, individuality vs. typification, organic form vs. geometric form, etc. - but also with interferences and mutual influences.
After several residential complexes, Fränkel's Lichtburg cinema and the Leuchtturm restaurant in Berlin, two buildings whose expressionist character was given both by the shaping of volumes and the use of artificial light to transfigure glass surfaces and exalt ^spatial directions, stand out3. In general terms, Fränkel's architecture was in the middle zone, an elegant modernism that combined the vitalist impulse of expressionism with the geometric discipline of rationalism.

The Scala building and cinema: façade towards Magheru Boulevard

II. ^Fränkel 's4 arrival in Bucharest coincided with a construction boom which, during the decade 1929-1939, was to substantially - though not always positively - change the appearance of the Romanian capital. It was the period of the continuation of major public works, such as the development of the boulevards (Kiseleff, Prezan and Jianu, today's Aviatorilor) and the area of parks and lakes in the north of the city, the construction of the Take Ionescu Boulevard, laid out before the First World War (today's Magheru-Bălcescu), etc., but also of the imposition of modernism as the dominant architectural direction. Some of Fränkel's remarkable local achievements - the Flavian villa on Kiseleff Road, the Adriatica building on Calea Victoriei or the Scala building and cinema on Magheru Boulevard - are fundamentally linked to this significant moment in the urban history of Bucharest.

III. The circumstances in which the Bragadiru heirs entrusted Fränkel with the project of the Scala Cinematograph on Take Ionescu Boulevard (today's 2-4 General Gh. Magheru Boulevard) are not known to us, but it is likely that one important reason was his previous experience in the field of theaters and ^cinemas5. It is certain, however, that in the absence of the right to practice in Romania, the authorization project was signed by Marcel Maller, a local architect whose name is linked to many buildings in interwar ^Bucharest6.
The general organization of the plan [1] speculates on the relationship between the trapezoidal shape of the land, the optimal shape of a cinema and the urban situation: towards the boulevard and closing the corner, a volume with commercial spaces on the ground floor and offices on the upper floors; at the back, set back but connected to the boulevard by the entrance, the 1,500-seat cinema and the necessary annexes.

The Scala building and cinema: 1st floor foyer

In the plan, the entrance vestibule and the ticket boxes continue into the foyer which follows the curve of the auditorium; on the opposite side, an additional space on a semicircular plan provides access to the perimeter cloakroom. With the same curvilinear shape as on the ground floor, the foyer is repeated on the first and second floors to allow access to the balcony of the hall and to the private rooms on the top floor.
The materials and colors emphasize the form and accentuate the horizontal: the vertical, recessed support elements and, in part, the floor are in black marble, while the walls and ceilings, straight or offset by successively recessed tiles, are painted in light, almost white colors. In this way, the structural tensions of the spaces are read more clearly, revealed either by the directional, horizontal character of the surfaces or by the indirect light lines of the hulls.
The abstract, purified character of the geometry is offset by the quality, even preciousness, of the materials [2]: the black marble slabs are complemented by bronze and glass doors, ebony stage frames, chairs upholstered in Terracotta-colored velvet or curtains in dark gold velvet.

Cinema Scala in 2019 © Daniela Puia

The planimetric structure is spatially translated through the movement created by successive and correlated directional tensions, starting with the horizontal of the foyer, continuing with the vertical of the taller volume that marks the entrance and, finally, with the horizontal of the lower body that follows the direction of Magheru Boulevard and closes the corner with C.A. Rosetti Street. The architectural treatment is subordinated to this dynamic scheme: the tall volume is expressed as a homogeneous orthogonal grid placed on a neutral background, the difference between the window and the parapet being hardly noticeable; the placement of the light firm just above it, across its full width, supports its elan, its visual and symbolic meaning [3]; the lower-height body is expressed as a rhythm of horizontals in which the light-colored fullness of the parapet alternates with the banded window, with the recessed post structure painted, like the window frames and exterior awnings, in a dark color. The "levitating" idea of this body is supported by the full, continuous glazing of the commercial ground floor.

Hans Poelzig: office building, Junkerstrasse, Breslau (Wroclav), 1912

Hans Scharoun: Eckfuncktion, watercolor, 1922-1923, Eberhard Syring, Jörg C. Kirschenmann, Hans Scharoun, 1893-1972: Outsider of Modernism, Taschen, 2007

IV. The location of the Scala building and the architectural solution adopted by Fränkel bring up two themes that found their most intense formulation in Expressionism: the dynamics of the horizontal and the tension of the corner [4].
As a rule, the horizontal and its complement, the strip window, are associated with their technical premise, the reinforced concrete skeleton, and with the interpretations of modernist rationalism belonging to the constructivist period of ^Mies7 or the Corbusian aesthetic codified in "Les cinq points d`une nouvelle architecture"^8. The theme of the retreat of the structure and the horizontal dominance of the facade is, however, older and dates back to the beginnings of Expressionism, as is evidenced by Hans Poelzig's 1912 office building in Breslau/Wroclaw. The dimensional relationship between parapet and column is still ambiguous, but the intention of the relegation of the vertical structure - which, since the first column, had dominated the entire history of architecture - and the accentuated expression of the succession of levels is clear. Radicalized after the First World War, the idea would generate one of the canonical schemes of international modernism: the horizontal layering of facades.
The corner is a critical point in urban topography - where directions meet or merge, stop or continue - a place whose conflictual nature is revealed by expressionism either through the dramatization of the ^vertical9 or the dynamics of the horizontal; in the latter sense, Hans Scharoun's 1920 watercolour The Function of the Corner (Eckfuncktion) is as evocative as it is visually and architecturally suggestive. Erich Mendelsohn would give various interpretations to the dynamics of the corner, starting with the Rudolf Mosse building in Berlin and continuing with the Schocken shops in Stuttgart and the Petersdorf in Breslau/Wroclaw.

At Scala, Fränkel works with both themes, adapting them to the elongated and somewhat cramped site. If the building on the other side of the Boulevard ^Magheru10, the corner is marked by a vertical volume, in Scala the ratio is reversed: from the taller, vertical and stabilizing volume, located in front of the boulevard, the horizontal dynamics of the lower volume is born, which curves at the intersection with the street C. A. Rosetti to take its direction [5]. The scheme could be likened to the one used in Mendelsohn's Schocken store in Chemnitz, but the cases are not similar: in Chemnitz, the broad curve of the façade and its rhythm of horizontals is, on the whole, relatively static, caught between the two registers of the vertical and recessed circulation; in Bucharest there is only one vertical element, asymmetrically positioned, and the tension is therefore more intense. The vertical turn of the cornice of the tall volume emphasizes the vectorial character of the composition, reinforcing the idea of a firm lateral boundary from which the horizontals of the floors start towards the corners.

And for such a movement not to be disturbed by anything, the window horizons must be continuous, homogeneous. Thus the artifice - we could say "formalistic", but perfectly logical - appears, which disguises the area of vertical circulation in the middle of the office bar [1], treating it in a similar way to the other windows: the artistic intention is obviously given priority over the functionalist morality of sincerity.

NOTES

1 On the life and work of Rudolf Fränkel see Gerardo Brown-Manrique, Rudolf Fränkel and Neues Bauen: Work in Germany, Romania and the United Kingdom, Wasmuth, 2009.
2 The term Neues Bauen was introduced in 1920 to name one of the exhibitions of the group of architects and artists - different in orientation but with an important expressionist component - Arbeitsrat für Kunst (see Dictionary of 20th Century Architecture, Thames and Hudson, 2000, p. 245).
The use of Bauen instead of Architektur was not accidental, the two terms being associated in German theory with the opposition between the historical/artistic/latin sense (Architektur) and the contemporary/constructive/Germanic sense (Bauen). Already in 1902, Hermann Muthesius, when asserting the need for a new architecture, used this conceptual opposition in the very title of his book Stilarchitektur und Baukunst.
The term Neues Bauen reappears in the 1926 article Grundlagen für Neues Bauen (Principles of New Architecture), which Gropius associated with the type of architecture that gives function a primary role in shaping form: "By contrast, the new attitude in architecture, which seeks to respond uniformly to the needs of life and art, has its starting point in the function of things, in their inner essence and in the type of person to whom they are addressed" (v. Ute Poerschke, Architectural Theory of Modernism. Relating Functions and Forms, Routledge, 2014, p. 146, note 56). Thanks to Gropius and the Bauhaus circle, the Neues Bauen was to be unilaterally associated - to the detriment of the expressionist alternative - with geometric rationalism, cubic forms and purged expression, going as far as the radicalism of the new objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit).
On the other hand, however, in Der Moderne Zweckbau (Der Moderne Zweckbau, written in 1923 but published in 1926), Adolf Behne distinguished between functionalism and rationalism, associating the former with individual, free form and the latter with general, geometric form. For Behne, functionalism was represented by the expressionism of Häring, Scharoun or Mendelsohn, because fitness for purpose and movement in space were associated with freedom rather than with the constraints of the geometric patterns of rationalism.
Erich Mendelsohn also had an expressive interpretation of function, set out in the text of a lecture given in Amsterdam in 1923, in which he distinguished three different, intransitive types of function: of the machine ("pure function as purpose"), of construction ("mathematical necessity") and of architecture ("spatial and formal dependence on the premises of purpose, material and construction"). Starting from the situation of Dutch architecture (the comparison between the "analytic Rotterdam" and the "visionary Amsterdam"), Mendelsohn proposes a new synthesis of the two components of architectural creation - the functional logic, "of the intellect, of the brain", and the formal expression, "of the creative impulse, of the organic feeling" - through what he calls "functional dynamics" (Erich Mendelsohn, Die Internationale Überreinstimmung des neuen Baugedankes oder Dynamik und Funktion, 1923, trans. Dinamică und funcțiune, in Nicolae Lascu - ed., Formă și funcțiune, Meridiane, 1989, p. 246-247).
3 What at the time was called lichtarchitektur, in which the older expressionist reverie of glass and light - "Glasarchitektur" (Paul Scherbaart), "Die Stadtkrone", "Alpine Architektur" (Bruno Taut) - intersected with the new industrial aesthetics of the Bauhaus: "The reflectors and neon tubes of advertising signs, the moving luminous letters of the firms, the rotating mechanisms of colored light bulbs, the electric light band of news bulletins are all elements of a new mode of expression, which will probably not long await its creative artists", Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zur Architektur, Bauhausbücher, 1929, trans. trans. The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, 1938, Dover Publications, p. 140.
4 In Romania, the architect changed his name to Fränkel (from Fraenkel), as it appears in all the works devoted to this period.
5 In the 1920s-1930s, Germany was the European country with the most developed film industry and an extensive network of cinemas.
6 Marcel Maller (1896-1978), see Simina Stan, http://arhitectura-1906.ro/2014/12/marcel-maller-viziuni-ale-spatiului-modern-bucurestean/
7 "The truss system supports the ceiling which, at the cantilevered end, is vertically enclosed by (...) a storage wall (...) above the 2 meters of storage is the continuous band of the window which touches the ceiling", Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bürohaus, in G - Material für Elementare Gestaltung, no. 1/July 1923.
8 "Progress brings liberation. Reinforced concrete revolutionizes the history of the window. Windows can stretch from one end of the facade to the other", Le Corbusier, Les cinqs points d`une nouvelle architecture, 1926, translated as The five points of a new architecture, in N. Lascu (ed.), op. cit., p. 333.
9 Such as some of the buildings of brick expressionism (Backsteinexpressionismus), such as Chilehaus (Fritz Höger, 1922) or Montanhof (Distel&Grubitz, 1924), both in Hamburg.
10 The office building at 1-3 Bulevardul Magheru, also apparently by Fränkel, see Gerardo Brown-Manrique, op. cit., p. 119.