ALESIA CINEMAS THEATER PARIS

Lead Designers Manuelle Gautrand

Entry Description

Around eight new, well-proportioned film theatres, we have designed unusually generous reception spaces, where cinemas are accessed via a circulation that is almost theatrical. A large vertical foyer contains stairs, escalators and tiered seating, which together form a sort of sculptural composition hung on the inside of the glazed façade.
This facade is composed of a dozen vertical ribbons, folded to form a cascade of alternating facets. Towards the centre, these great folds are glazed and covered in bars of LEDs to form a huge curtain of pixels.
While the LEDs are densely grouped towards the centre, they become more dissipated toward the edges of the facade: the aim of this is to gradually pixelate the image as you move away from the centre, screening the images in a way that has a certain poetic, even artistic quality.
The facade for the project required a specific design, somewhere between a lighting installation and a digital skin. Screening is made possible by 230,000 luminous points spread over a height of 12m and a width of 19m, each independently controlled.
Day and night, this large animated envelope will play with a superimposition of images and content. The internal foyer spaces can be glimpsed through moving images that act like a luminous filter.