Arruga Movie Studio

Arruga Movie Studio

The project is born from the decision to locate the Arruga cinema studios in an industrial area of the periphery of Barcelona, considering movie and advertising production an industrial activity.

Thus, a building intended to harbor a creative activity, would have to co-exist in a gray and mute world - without language - of factories and stores with activity schedules typical of the industrial areas.

Because of the impossibility of generating a dialogue with its neighbors, the building becomes the image and the reflection of its own essence, thus showing itself in the only possible way: a building to make movies.

Its main façade becomes a piece of celluloid at night, converting into cinema the activity of the building itself: production, post-production, execution.. with the rest of the program hidden behind the blind box: casting, wardrobe, attretzo, stores, assemblies, workshops, dressing rooms and services, and finally the great space used as movie stage which presents itself in its most neutral form.

The construction, material, structure and facilities of this space are put to the service of the main activity reinforcing the neutrality of the project.

The building is built with the technology and budget of an industrial warehouse: exposed steel structure with fires protection, deck floor slabs, concrete block walls, polished concrete floors, exposed services, façade of cement-wood boards.

The project incorporates a linear plantation of populus teixana, as an external element, close to the main facade.

This vegetation reveals a new interstitial space which is the negative of the interior. This space relates the internal activity with the outside space, and also uses its changing condition.

In summer a thick green mattress protects from the sun, in autumn it changes color and purges its leaves, in winter it becomes a reflection on the arge glazed window and in spring it shows its different colorings.

There is an open space intended for arrival and vehicles traffic between this tree screen and the street of the industrial area.
Finally, in an industrial area, a gray box poses an architectural issue: the relationship between the envelope and the internal space articulated by light.