cinema

The winning project of the second Garage Museum of Contemporary Art competition for the design of a pop-up summer cinema, organized by Strelka KB, was  selected out of 136 submissions from Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia.

The multiplex Etoile Cinémas was the opportunity to deal with issues of cultural and entertainment architecture. The project is part of the local development policy initiated by the city via the label SmartCity. How and with which architectural devices an architecture may show off the spectator? Inspired by Broadway by light by William Klein (1958), we centered the project on the key concept of a transfiguring performance. A cinema is a complex architecture dedicated to entertainment but also to culture and representation: we wanted our cinema to be a new place of meeting, identifiable in the urban landscape, and infused with a new grandeur to make the cinephile feels like a privileged guest.

Located on the north side of the historic center of the town of Cahors and a few steps away from the banks of the Lot River, this cinema stands on a former site dedicated to the army (today renamed Place Bessières). The project offered the opportunity to recreate and reinterpret the symmetry of the preexisting army barracks by occupying the area of the east wing of this complex, destroyed by fire in 1943. Previously serving as a parking lot, the Place Bessières has been transformed into a broad and welcoming urban space dedicated to pedestrians and protected by an existing canopy of trees.

PASAKA cinema house is a part of ‘Paupys’ quarter – a piece of large-scale district conversion project that transforms old capital areas into harmonious zones for work and living. Design and urban layout of the site were developed relying on the history and context of the site.

As a commonly used building material, wood is widely selected for architectural, interior and landscape spaces. Wood pattern always give people the sense of warmth and comfort. Hence, the designers have decided to pay a tribute to this traditionally used material, wood with a modern twist.

When designing this cinema in Longhua, Shenzhen, the designers recreate a virtual world of architecture – showing us a combination of real life and virtual elements. The designers use vertical and horizontal lines to build up their design concept in mind. One can see a variety of lines scattered around the cinema. When one looks at the interior of the design, it’s as if the designers are using the design and drafting software application, the Autocad 3D to draw simple grid lines one by one until the draft of the design is completed. To reflect this concept in reality, the designers use horizontal and vertical lines as their main stroke, as if turning the virtual design into a reality. The designers hope to create a real-life scene in a virtual world – just like the virtual world in the movies, creating buildings one by one. The designers combine the illusory world of the film with the cinema design, supporting the theme of the entire design with vertical and horizontal grid lines, illustrating the wonderful connection between reality and illusion.

For decades, film directors have used megaphones to communicate with their cast and crew on sets where it was hard to hear. The acoustic megaphone became an iconic clichéd symbol of a movie director. The designers were inspired by these cone-shaped acoustic horn and have thus developed various functional objects that are placed within the interior to echo with the ‘megaphone’ theme.

The new multi-cinema project takes place in the future site of the “Jardin de la Culture” close to the historical city center of Riom. Once this cultural enclosure, was the “Redemptoristine convent’s garden”.Nowadays, this new program offers: a multimedia library project, a music school (reconversion of old convent) and the cinema project. For this project, we have worked in collaboration with the communes’s community of Riom Limagne et Volcans and Frédéric Emile, the operator. This project consists in 3 cinema’s room with 543 seats and a 112 seats conference room.

The new Riverfront improves the visitor experience, expands the venue’s commercial potential and provides a dramatic new entrance to the building from Queen’s Walk. This transformation has revitalised the BFI’s identity which has recessed in recent years and increased the visibility of theBFI’s offer, proudly reconfirming its place as one of the national cultural institutions on the SouthBank.