cinema

RISE Design Studio has completed the refurbishment and extension of London’s only social enterprise cinema, The Lexi, in Kensal Rise. A treasured asset within the local community, The Lexi Cinema tasked RISE Design Studio with revitalizing a 99-square meter parcel of vacant land in the rear car park of the existing Edwardian gabled brick theatre. Used as a makeshift bar by locals, RISE Design Studio and The Lexi team consulted Brent Council who advised the initial concept, a formal beer garden, would not be possible due to noise constraints but an enclosed second screen might be feasible.

Camden’s new cinema represents the adaptation and renewal of the once industrial infill lining its viaducts. The ambition for our second Curzon location sought to retain as much of the landlord’s pre-existing shell as possible, re-purposing the building fabric installed as part of the larger Hawley Wharf regeneration. Working with the inherited materials, we inserted new architectural elements with their own language which now define the public spaces of the cinema.

On the last building plot in the prestigious Nordhavn in Copenhagen, Arkitema has designed the eye-catching cinema BIG BIO, which is Denmark’s first sustainable cinema. The vision was to create a cultural building that adds something extraordinary to the Århusgade area in Copenhagen’s new city district Nordhavn and at the same time contributes to strengthening the special identity that the district already possesses. 

Bold colours, strong geometric shapes and a ‘flashback’ to the famous buildings of old Saigon come into focus in a new cinema design in HCMC. Vietnamese interiors company Module K has completed their first cinema. Located on the ground floor of an existing shopping mall, the 2000 m2 cinema for Beta Media seats 1000 and is aimed at millennials with its Saigon vibe and architectural vocabulary. Each detail of the design references significant Saigon landmarks dotted around the city: the Municipal Opera House, Ben Thanh Market, Central Post Office, Tan Dinh Church, Paris Commune Square and the small alleys.

The uniqueness of a performance which integrates the illusion of projection mapping technology with the realism of stage performers is key in generating the imagination of the audiences. This sparks the ideas for the designer team to incorporate these illusion techniques to create the same effect of imagination with architecture.

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.