Cinéma Royal Tavannes1999
To attract employees for the new Tavannes Watch Company in 1921 the director decided to construct a grand cinema building in the centre of the village. For over 2 years it was the biggest of Switzerland and received a heroic plaster decoration in a so-called ‘Hollywood Style’. Over the decades sound was introduced in the film productions worldwide and slowly the inner shells of projection spaces were covered with layers of heavy velvet fabrics.
L’architecte Walter Rengg accompagné par Charles Edouard Jeanneret construisent deux cinémas à la même époque dans la région du Jura. Un à La Chaux-de-Fonds et l’autre à Tavannes. Sur les deux bâtiments ils reproduisent les mêmes petites fenêtres ovales.
Over the decades sound was introduced in the film productions and slowly, world wide, the inner shells of projection spaces were covered with layers of heavy velvet fabrics. The same happenend in Tavannes. We started to remove the grubby velvet to rediscover the embossed plasterwalls.
The program consisted of the construction of a new studio-cinema, a concert-café and down stairs, in the former ‘Cabaret’, the installation of a regional library. Our idea was to install in the grand projection hall a kind of a black prosthesis. This dark element in an S shape would help the building to reorganise and inhabit the complex program. We called it the ‘shifted Janus’.
