With the beginning of the 20th century, cinema buildings began to be built. The first and largest in Stanislavov was the Ton cinema building with its auditorium.

The genesis of the cinema building in Stanislavov

One of the most impressive edifices of interwar Stanislavov was the Ton cinema, located near Mickiewicz Square. In 1894-1905 the building of the Sokol Gymnastic Society was erected here, designed in the historicising style by the Cracow architect Karol Zaremba (1846-1897).

In 1927 the building caught fire, as it was insured, the Polish Gymnastic Society managed not only to rebuild it, but also to extend it with a cinema building. This created the largest cinema in the city with an auditorium for 600 people.

Stanislaw Trela designed the Ton cinema building in Stanislawow

The extension project was designed by Stanislav Trela (1892-?), the most prominent representative of the interwar architectural community of Stanislavov, the author of the largest monumental edifices of the second half of the 1920s, including the Town Hall, which remains a symbol of the city to this day.

In 1924, Trela graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Lviv Polytechnic. A year later he found himself in Stanislawow, where he spent seven years, taking an active part in the city's social life. In addition to his position as city architect, which he held from 1928, he served as president of the Society of Independent Construction Managers, and also published professional texts in the local press. In architectural design, as a pupil of the eminent Lvov architect Professor Witold Minkiewicz, he was a proponent of modern structures and forms, although not devoid of references to tradition. His last project in the city was the reinforced concrete bell tower at the baroque collegiate church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, maintained in extremely simplified, functionalist forms.

Architecture of the first cinemas

The building of the Ton cinema in Stanislavl is an interesting example of a new architectural phenomenon in the 20th century, which were cinema buildings.

The first cinemas were not architecturally impressive. They were organised in adapted premises, usually in the ground floors of shop buildings. It was usually a dark room with a few rows of chairs, a projection machine, a canvas on the wall and a piano. Over time, however, the appearance of cinemas changed. Even before the outbreak of the First World War, stand-alone cinema buildings appeared, gradually becoming larger and more representative. By the end of the 1920s, cinemas had become independent as an architectural type, which was primarily a consequence of the introduction of sound cinema (the first sound film, The Jazz Band Singer , was released in American cinemas in October 1927). This necessitated the inclusion of acoustics in the design of cinema halls, not least to eliminate reverberation.

The architecture of cinema buildings

Large cinema buildings were also built on Polish soil, and the Stanislawow Ton is undoubtedly one of the representative examples of this stage of cinema architecture development. Although there were already several cinemas in Stanislawow, Ton was the first sound cinema - hence the name.

In terms of form, the architect used the convention of academic classicism, designing the façade in the form of a massive recessed portico, supported by three pairs of Ionic columns. He was undoubtedly trying to fit in with current trends. The 1920s saw the construction of huge cinema buildings with several thousand seats, exclusive interiors and decorative, historicising architecture, particularly characteristic of the United States (the so-called movie palaces). Such massive edifices were also built in Europe. At the end of the 1920s, the largest European cinema was Hamburg's Ufa-Palast with 2,750 seats, while by the end of the inter-war period such giant buildings as Le Grand Rex in Paris with 3,300 seats and the Gaumont State Cinema in London with more than 4,000 seats had been built.

The current history of the cinema building in Stanislavov

The building of the former Ton cinema still performs its original function, only the name changed after 1939. During the years of German occupation, it was called Victoria, and a sign hung above the entrance door saying "nur für Deutsche". In 1945, it became the Ivan Franko Soviet cinema theatre. It now bears the name Lumiere (Люм'єр).