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Cinéma Métropole

Cinéma Métropole is an Art Deco building which was designed by the architect Adrien Blomme and can be found in Brussels, Belgium.

Location

The Cinema is located at number 30 on Rue Neuve, the main pedestrian shopping street in the inner city of Brussels.

History

From 1930 to 1932, the architect Adrien Blomme, assisted by fellow Parisian architect R. Nicolas, built several additions to the Hotel Metropole, including a cinema, shops, a tavern, banquet halls and two floors filled with hotel rooms ^[1]. The inauguration took place on October 27th, 1932, in the presence of Queen Elisabeth and Princess Astrid. The banquet hall was the largest in Belgium at the time and could accommodate up to 3,000 guests. Like many theatres affected by falling audiences in the 1970s, the operator tried to increase his dwindling profit by increasing the number of auditoriums. A concrete slab was poured on the second balcony, then later on the first balcony but none of those measures worked. In 1982, the owner of Hotel Metropole, Eric Wielemans, had the ground floor transformed into a commercial space. In 1994 the rooms were destroyed to make room for an extension of the store. From the old cinema, few things have been preserved, among them the famous mural by Ossip Zadkine.

Architecture

The cinema has a huge travertine façade, which is 22 meters wide, with six levels slightly set back from each other and two attics with a much larger setback which are hardly visible from the street. The central part of the façade is filled with a monumental five-storey high entrance made up of two large sections of blind walls enclosed by polygonal pilasters, supporting an enormous entablature located at the height of the fourth floor, where once the name of the Cinéma Métropole was displayed in big letters. The entrance is within the entablature and consists of large concave glass roof which is topped by a triple convex glass roof.

Access

De Brouckère metro station

References

Le Patrimoine monumental de la Belgique, Bruxelles, Volume 1C, Pentagone N-Z, Pierre Mardaga éditeur, 1994, pp. 15-16

^ Le Patrimoine monumental de la Belgique, Bruxelles, Volume 1C, Pentagone N-Z, Pierre Mardaga éditeur, 1994, pp. 15-16

[1] Le Patrimoine monumental de la Belgique, Bruxelles, Volume 1C, Pentagone N-Z, Pierre Mardaga éditeur, 1994, pp. 15-16

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