World renowned architect Renzo Piano appealed to keep Rome’s cinemas from closing saying amid an emergency that they created a vital space for the community.
Talking to la Repubblica daily, the 87-year-old Pompidou Centre and Shard creator said: “Dear editor-in-chief, this is my heartfelt appeal so that cinemas, these precious ‘places for the people’, are preserved in the urban fabric of our cities, and in particular those of Rome.
“I think that the long dispute over the protection of the intended use of Roman and Parisian movie theatres is the point of a possible urban redemption.
“Those spaces, whether active or abandoned, represent the last lungs of oxygen for our cities, increasingly saturated with cars, shopping centres, hotels and vacation homes.
“The opening to the reconversion of those areas will become the tombstone of our metropolises in a few years, damaging everything, including retail trade.
“If the cinemas can be converted, after a few years of closure, into places exclusively aimed at profit, the value of those properties will rise, and the decline of essential places of culture, such as movie theatres, will be inevitable.
“This will lead the owners of the walls to prefer the termination of contracts with the managers of cultural activities and the closure of those structures for years, in order to wait for greater earnings thanks to the reconversion”.
Piano also provides figures: in Paris, an average rent for a movie theatre of 5,000 euros a month for 15 years yields about 900,000 euros, while the same space, converted, can reach a value of over 10 million.
“I believe the same calculation also applies to Rome.” Taking the example of the Roman forums, which “not even the barbarians once they entered Rome dared” to convert into something else, “today, as in the past, it is essential to recognize the importance of our cultural spaces, in Rome as in all the capitals of Europe.
We cannot let go of all those places within which the community is created, strengthened and at the same time brings outside itself the space that becomes a city.
“The mistake that politics is often making, unfortunately, is to see these structures only as cinemas, forgetting that their intended use is broader (theaters, cinemas, concert halls, theatrical performances and the like) and that they could be transformed into what, here in France, are called tiers-lieux (third places)”.
The architect cited the experience of the Piccolo America, created illegally out of a social need, to save the old Cinema America from reconversion: “Today the Cinema Troisi with its free and open study room is an urban emergency room: it is urbanity, it is the civic value of the city”.
Since the administration proposed the rule that opened this dispute, Piano has learned that “various real estate agencies are reporting that the value of the skeletons of the former cinemas has doubled or even tripled.”
Sources: la Repubblica/ANSA