Marble house
The marble house in Berlin is located in the district of Charlottenburg at Kurfürstendamm 236 opposite the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church . It was built as a cinema in 1912/1913 based on plans by the architect Hugo Pál . It was named after a noble facade made of marble, which rose to its full height over five floors. The expressionist wall and ceiling paintings in the foyer and auditorium were designed by the painter César Klein . He also designed the colored glass ceiling in the foyer, carried out by the Puhl & Wagner company in Berlin-Neukölln .
The house opened with the premiere of Walter Schmidthässler's film Das goldene Bett on May 9, 1913.
After the renovation by UFA in 1975, four box-type cinemas were built in addition to the large hall with balcony . In the 1980s, the house acquired a legendary reputation through the regular "Long Film Nights", with twelve films in four cinemas for one price.
The cinema underwent an urgently needed complete renovation in 1997. However, this could not stop the decline in viewers, which has affected all traditional Ku'damm cinemas since the opening of more and more multiplex cinemas . Just three years after the renovation, the owner of the house, UFA boss Volker Riech, found it more attractive to sell the coveted Kurfürstendamm property than to continue operating the cinema. With the marble house, the oldest cinema on Kurfürstendamm closed in 2001.
The property was sold in July 2010 for over 40 million euros to the Aachener Grundbesitz Kapitalanlagegesellschaft . Until then, the marble house was owned by an Irish investment company. A branch of the Spanish fashion chain Zara used the building for 17 years and moved out in March 2019. Since June 2020, a deal which is Japanese lifestyle chain Muji it.
Web links
- UFA marble house on kinokompendium.de
- Entry in the Berlin State Monument List
- Pictures and floor plans for the marble house in the Berlin architecture world (1914), pp. 296–298
Individual evidence
- ^ Gerhard Lamprecht: German silent films 1913 . Deutsche Kinemathek e. V., Berlin 1969, p. 36 .
- ↑ Marble house on Kudamm has a new owner. In: Berliner Morgenpost , July 27, 2010
- ↑ Zara am Ku'damm closes after 17 years In: berlin.de , accessed on June 19, 2020.
- ↑ Jan Scröder: Muji opens flagship in Berlin's marble house. In: fashionunited.de. June 19, 2020, accessed June 19, 2020 .
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 14.9 ″ N , 13 ° 20 ′ 3.7 ″ E