Exactly a century ago, the first of a new type of building that would transform our cultural lives was constructed. At 8am on Monday 19th June 1905, on Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh, the first purpose-built movie theatre, a 96-seater, was opened by local entrepreneurs Harry Davis and John Harris. They called it a "nickelodeon," combining the cost of admission with the Greek word for theatre. On the first day, 450 people queued, in 32-degree heat, to see the 15-minute programmes of shorts and "funnies," repeated over 16 hours. On day two the numbers grew to 1,500. Such was the cinema's success that by 1907, 2,500 of these buildings had appeared in the US. The new downmarket, democratic medium of film had found an architectural-psychological home.
The nickelodeon was particularly popular with immigrants (the films were silent), kids, and the working classes. Almost at once, social activists were concerned that such people—and single women too!—were gathering together in the dark. Surely the effects on society would be detrimental? But in the century that followed, once movies shook off their initial social stigma, the buildings in which they were projected began to be seen not as a threat to community, but a constituent of it. Many examples of this remain today. In Darwin, Australia, a major attraction is the Deckchair cinema; during the siege of Sarajevo, an underground cinema kept going, projecting movies on video; in 1996, when the owners announced the sale of the Plaza cinema in Liverpool, local volunteers set up the Crosby community cinema trust and ran the place themselves; in many towns, the façades of long-abandoned cinemas are listed buildings.
Three architectural trends emerged: the gothic-baroque movie palaces of the late 1910s and 1920s, such as Grauman's Million Dollar Theatre in Los Angeles; the modernist art deco theatres of the 1930s and 1940s, with their soaring fin towers and Frank Lloyd Wright horizontals; and the suburban multiplex barns of the 1980s. Each reflected the intentions of the movie world of its time. Grauman's resembled the central portal of Notre Dame in Paris. Cinemas were cathedrals; people went there to worship. But in towns of the 1920s that needed cinemas only half that size, the solution was the geometrics of art deco, exuding Europeanness and luxury. The opening of New York's Radio City Music Hall in 1932 captured something of the speed, vitality and optimism of cinema in the sound era. Film revenues were still in ascendance, and as deco came to influence the production design of movies themselves, the fit between medium and architecture seemed complete.
Then came the slow decline in film-going. In 1949, as a result of antitrust legislation, the main Hollywood studios were ordered to divest themselves of their movie theatres, so third-party developers bought and ran them. From the 1950s to the late 1970s, the movie cathedrals were bulldozed or converted—Grauman's ironically became a church—and deco cinemas around the world were closed or became bingo halls. The revival of moviegoing in the late 1970s—inspired by The Exorcist, Jaws and Star Wars—caused a rethink. When the devastated and desperate Hollywood studios discovered to their relief that they had an audience again, they looked at that audience and discovered that it was male, teenage and suburban. Middle-aged people, who liked a bit of comfort, were nowhere to be seen. Then Reagan's 1986 antitrust reforms allowed studios to reacquire cinemas, and a massive building programme took place. This time cinemas were small and unadorned. Six or more would be housed in a single space with a central or electronic projection box, massively reducing projectionists' salaries. The foyers of these places looked as if they were designed by Willy Wonka: all neon, spun sugar and fizzy drinks. This was cinema architecture in its third manifestation: industrial and infantile. It is easy to see the pattern: a return to cinema's profane and ignoble origins. The prestige-less architecture of the multiplex reflected the opprobrium the film world had incurred.
In the 1990s, the pattern of the 1910s and 1920s continued to repeat itself. The prestige of the movies began to return. The Odeon chain rebranded itself Fanatical About Films. The second-generation multiplexes made a bit more effort with seating and lighting. Older moviegoers returned and added to the fragmentation of audience demographics. So where does that leave cinema design? If history is anything to go by, if the industry is to capitalise on the revival of its prestige, a new idiom is needed. Something that leapfrogs the baroque uncertainties of the movie cathedrals and finds a 21st-century equivalent of the deco cinemas.
There are many possibilities. Edinburgh's art cinema, Filmhouse, and the Edinburgh international film festival have combined forces to look at new types of movie buildings which rethink exhibition and combine it with a festival centre, production companies, rooftop bars and restaurants. Architects at Richard Murphy have proposed a series of auditoriums with open outlooks to Edinburgh Castle that close as the movie is about to begin, thus reversing the idea of the womb-like black cinema box. Such rethinks are desirable if we are to attract people back to cinemas and remind them why DVD is only second best.
