Auditorium Theatre of Llinars del Vallès

About this place

The Auditorium Theatre of Llinars del Vallès is an unlikely Siza — a modest civic theatre in a small town in the Vallès Oriental comarca, about 40 kilometres northeast of Barcelona. Álvaro Siza Vieira designed it in collaboration with local practice Aresta Arquitectura and the engineers G.O.P., and it was completed in 2015 after a long gestation rooted in the economic difficulties of the preceding years. The building is compact and deliberately reticent. Its primary material is red brick — unusual for Siza, more associated with the white rendered surfaces of his Portuguese work — and the massing is a collection of intersecting rectilinear volumes that read from the street as a series of layered planes. There is no grand gesture, no signature flourish: the building inserts itself into the existing urban fabric of a small Catalan town with the kind of civic modesty that public architecture in this scale should probably always aspire to. Inside, the 300-seat auditorium is the project's core. The section is carefully developed to serve multiple uses — theatrical performances, music, civic events — and the acoustic and technical fit-out matches the spatial quality of the envelope. Siza's characteristic attention to threshold, to the transition between entrance and the interior, is present here in compressed form: the foyer is small but the passage into the auditorium is handled with care. For anyone travelling through Catalonia with an interest in Siza's later work, this building demonstrates how his discipline operates at the smallest civic scale. It is unspectacular from the outside and all the more worth finding.