The Rossiya cinema, built in 1961, has successfully survived the film boom of recent decades and has grown only with the lurid extension of the Shangrila casino. The cinema is still a single-screen theater with 2,056 seats, and it is still unclear whether the company that owns it, KARO Film, will convert it into a modern multiplex. Changing the face does not even involve such a rework, as it is a competition of concepts and ideas, not projects. The purpose of the competition, which is regularly held by DuPont, is to demonstrate the possibilities of changing a well-known building using materials and technological solutions offered by this company. So far, these competitions have not passed the stage of ideas, although it cannot be said that this was completely incredible. Once the experimental masterpiece was even the Roman Colosseum itself, which naturally did not begin to be altered (which, frankly, is for the better). But the local authorities liked the options for the reconstruction of the Piraeus Tower in the port of Athens - it is possible that the tower will be the first implementation in the history of "Changing the face".
The current competition turned out to be the most crowded in all the past years: more than 1000 applications from 62 countries were submitted. The short list includes 70 projects. The winner was the Colombian architect Juan Andrés Diaz Para with the Frozen in Time project. He was inspired by the words “frost and sun, a wonderful day” that are commonplace for Russian schoolchildren. The building is dressed like a hedgehog, wrapped in thin metal tubes. In winter, water should ooze and freeze from them, forming a halo of various icicles around the cinema. In summer, the wall would turn into a weeping fountain like that of Bakhchisarai and even surrounded the building with a small cloud, similar to the famous Diller and Scoffidio pavilion.
The second place went to the Moving Light Palace project, developed by a team from Germany (Adrian Reinbrot, Franziska Betcher and Jenny Grossman). The architects came up with the idea to change the appearance of the cinema with a curtain of thin luminous wires with interactive illumination. The wires glow when the wind blows or if a person touches them - thus the authors decided to involve visitors in shaping the appearance of the building. This theater curtain is reflected in the new gold-tone glass façade and several rectangular pools in front of it.
Joseph Sung from South Korea compared cinema to jewelry and called the project The Pushkinsky Jewel. He proposed to pack the building in a glass box, thereby increasing its area and adding public space. The perimeter of the building is stretched to form a promenade gallery.
Three more projects also reached the final of the competition. So in the work titled "All the World's a Stage" ("The whole world is a stage") it is supposed to "curtain" the restored facades of the cinema with a double white "wall", reminiscent of giant vertical blinds. The "wall" becomes a surface for a spectacular play of light and different images.
The RECONNECTION project proposes to eliminate temporary “build-ups” that hinder the perception of the authentic look of a 1960s cinema. free the built-up arcades of the lower floor and connect the main gallery with the changed space of the square. The architects are covering the existing staircase with a new "layer" of the park, so that the space in front of the building literally flows inward. The facades of the cinema are made interactive with the ability to arrange various presentations on them.
And finally, another finalist of the competition, the NESTING THEATERS project, covers the cinema along with the space in front of it with bright red material from Corian, symbolizing the famous red carpet. Thus, the authors announced their intention to transform "Pushkinskiy" from a place for individual viewing of films into a space of social activity and various social events.
These and other projects can be seen at the newly opened exhibition in the Central House of Architects; the projects included in the shortlist of the competition are published here.
N. K.
