Client: Hubei Xiang Sheng Yin Xing Entertainment Management Co., Ltd.

Overview

The project design theme is ‘The City’. In most movie worlds, the story usually starts in a bustling city, therefore, the designers drew inspiration from the aerial view of cities, presenting the hustle and bustle of cities in a figurative way, in the space that interacts with movies.
There are many ‘boxes’ in rectangular or trapezoidal shapes on the ceilings and walls, extending in various heights and angles in the lobby, which is the image of a bustling metropolis with skyscrapers. The unique mottled pattern of marble runs throughout the space, with natural stone used for the floor, the walls, the seating and the bar counter. The ceiling, on the other hand, is a transfer of the stone pattern printed onto the metal panel surface.
In IMAX auditorium, the pattern was replaced with a red stone one, through which can bring people strong emotions caused by the film, as a way to express the city’s bustle and passion. As for the other auditoriums, the color scheme is dark blue with brown. Those marble pattern were printed on the cloth to form the ceiling, the wall as well as the floor.

Goals

The main purpose is to present the hustle and bustle of cities in a figurative way, and stone is inseparable from both ancient and modern architecture in cities, so the designers chose marble as the main material. The lobby is a blend of real marble and metal panels. Using metal panels rather than natural stone to create the ceiling was a result of cost control and weight reduction. Considering the effect of materials on sound transmission in auditoriums, the designers chose to create the space with marble patterns printed on the cloth.
The intersecting roads in the city form small plots of land, and the overall space was considered to be divided in this way at the beginning of the design, so the geometry form the ceilings, the walls and the floor with different alignment, as if they were suddenly withdrawn, but with the connection of forming a surface field with each other. The designers applied this approach to the color separation of the tiles on the wall of the walkway as well. The color is a combination of dark brown and warm gray color.

Process

The designers invested a great deal of time and effort in travelling to Shuitou, Fujian Province, the distribution center for stone in China, not only to find stones that fit the design theme of the project, but also to photograph the clear textures of these stones. In order to get the metal panels on the ceiling of the lobby closer to the real stone color, they kept experimenting to achieve the most ideal result, from the stringent requirements for the shooting surroundings, to the repetitive printing process of metal panels samples. As for the auditorium, several patterns of cloth samples were compared and adjusted to reach the final result presenting in the space.

Additional Information

The luminaires in the blobby were concealed, only the light illuminates the straight gaps between the ‘boxes’, like the flowing and shining streets in cities. The lounge and concession area here echo the shape of the ceiling, and people can rest on those staggered blocks of seating as they wait for the film to start. Besides, several LED screens on the ceilings and walls show different images of cities’ architecture to enrich the visual effect of the space. The combination of dark brown and warm gray color is more like a cup of hot coffee in the bitter cold wind, and the unique retro elegance is the mark etched on the marble by the years. The movie theatre gives a sense of neatness and clear lines, just like the layout of a perfectly planned city. However, within such a regular framework, people actually have their own unique life path, they are part of the city, and they make the city a colorful storytelling place. There are thousands of ways to live a life, and everyone is the leading role of his or her own colorful life movie.