The Guadalajara Casino by architect Aurelio Botella Enríquez: the brief life of an exponent of expressionism rationalism
Submitted: 2026-02-15
|Accepted: 2026-05-18
|Published: 2026-06-11
Copyright (c) 2026 Antonio Miguel Trallero Sanz, Antonio Miguel Trallero Arroyo
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Keywords:
diagonal floor plan, curved chamfer, Guadalajara Casino, Botella Enríquez, Gutiérrez Soto
Supporting agencies:
Abstract:
Following the fire that destroyed the Guadalajara Casino on 14 September 1930, the Society commissioned architect Aurelio Botella Enríquez to design a new building, the project for which was drafted that same year. A few months later, he produced a revised proposal simplifying the programme, which was ultimately the version that was built. This project constitutes the subject of the present study. Through its analysis, the aim is to recover its memory and, above all, to highlight its importance from an architectural point of view. This new building was destroyed in July 1936. It was a Rationalist building with a marked Expressionist character, designed in 1930, the same year in which Luis Gutiérrez Soto designed the Barceló Cinema, a building with which, despite the difference in scale, it shares many similarities. Beyond the analogies in the façades and other formal solutions previously employed by Gutiérrez Soto (Europa Cinema, 1928), particularly noteworthy is the use of the innovative diagonal floor-plan model of the Barceló Cinema, the same model that Aurelio Botella Enríquez employed in the Guadalajara Casino in the very same year as Gutiérrez Soto.
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