The Valby Kino: A Century-Old Cinema Reimagined as a Luminous Community Hub

When the Valby Kino closed its doors in 2018, the neighbourhood lost more than a cinema. Built in 1922, the modest brick building had been a gathering place for generations of Copenhagen residents: a rare survivor of the city's early cinema boom, and one of the few neighbourhood theatres to escape demolition or conversion into a supermarket.

The challenge for the architects was clear: how to honour the building's history while making it viable for contemporary use. The solution they arrived at is both respectful and radical: a careful restoration of the street-facing facade and lobby, paired with a dramatic intervention in the auditorium itself.

"We wanted to keep the memory of the cinema alive, but not as a museum piece. The building needed to work for the community as it is now."

The original auditorium, with its raked floor and low ceiling, was stripped back to its structural shell. In its place, the architects inserted a new two-storey volume clad in pale timber panels. The upper level houses a flexible event space with operable walls; the ground floor is a cafe and co-working area that opens onto a new courtyard garden.

The most striking element is the light. Where the old cinema was deliberately dark, the new interior is flooded with daylight from a series of skylights cut into the roof. The timber panels, left untreated, will silver with age, a deliberate echo of the weathered brick outside.

The project has been embraced by the neighbourhood. On a recent visit the cafe was full of locals working on laptops, and a children's theatre group was rehearsing upstairs. The Valby Kino is no longer a cinema, but it remains, in the best sense, a public room.