The history of film festivals is also the architectural and urbanistic history of the buildings and cities that host them. For decades, San Sebastian cast about for a ‘festival palace’ to match its international ambition and outreach. From the moment the event began until the new Kursaal was built in 1999, this function was performed by the Victoria Eugenia Theatre. The increase in complaints due to the technical limitations of these facilities—which weren’t to be given a complete overhaul until 1985—coincided with several failed projects to create a new hub on the site of the Gran Casino Kursaal, demolished in 1972. Despite the two invitations for international tenders (announced in 1964 and 1972, whose resulting projects were compiled by the architects Mario Sangalli and Iñigo Viar into an exhibition project held in 2019), a series of administrative disagreements and obstacles finally meant that the so-called “solar K” languished in disuse for more than two decades.

A third call for projects, in 1989, led to construction of the Kursaal Conference Centre and Auditorium as we know it today, by the architect Rafael Moneo. Before the work began in 1995, the City Council announced the project by means of an exhibition held in San Telmo Museum. The San Sebastian Festival archive contains an institutional publication setting out the main conclusions of a questionnaire completed by visitors to the exhibition. The document enthusiastically celebrates the “high degree of social consensus” created by the proposal, while clearly stating the intention to endow the city with a “key infrastructure for the San Sebastian of the 21st century” and which would become and remain the Festival’s central hub.

From the point of view of general festival history, this development (and the institutional rhetoric accompanying it) comes as little surprise. The change of millennium coincides with an increased professional development of the festival circuit, immersed in a global competition closely linked to city branding and urban transformation processes. Thus, the opening of Moneo’s Kursaal in 1999 must be seen in relation to other emblematic cases, from relocation of the Berlinale into the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz designed by Renzo Piano in 2000, to the complete remodelling of Rotterdam Port in 2001, inseparable from the institutional consolidation of the IFFR.