The cinema is located in the MoreMall shopping and entertainment center, built last year. Three-storey building with a total area of 168 thousand sq. M. grew up in the very center of the resort town and is already recognized as the largest complex of its kind in Sochi. The eight-hall "Luxor IMAX" is located on the top floor and is one of the main tenants of the complex, responsible for the entertainment component of "MoreMall". The total area of the cinema is 2800 square meters, 800 of which are in public areas. The architects were supposed to turn them into a bright memorable space - the right to come up with the interiors of this object was played out in a tender, the winner of which was the UNK project bureau.
The authors of the project were looking for a key architectural image for this space for a long time. According to Yulia Tryaskina, on the one hand, it was obvious to them that it should be somehow connected with the sea, but, on the other, they really wanted to get away from banal metaphors. Water, glare of light, sea foam, the inhabitants of the bottom of the sea - all this was asked for in the interior, but the architects continued to filter the associations that came to mind in order to find something truly original. The deep-sea theme seemed preferable also because one of the main decorations of the building of the mall was a giant skylight in the form of a glass wave rising above the main volume. It is quite logical that if the shopping areas are permeated, thanks to this lantern, with the sun's rays, then the artificial lighting of the cinema is a kind of their reflection, which has passed through the water column.
The decision was also prompted by the configuration of the cinema premises itself: when the architects developed a draft of its layout, placing the required number of halls, restaurants and ticket offices in the allotted area, it became clear that the public areas in the plan were several rectangles flowing into each other, which gradually transform from wide into narrow corridor leading to the halls. A kind of prominence or the same gradually fading ray. To convey the feeling of slowly disappearing light, of course, was to be done with the help of lighting systems, but the architects here, too, preferred not to act "head-on".
With the cinema halls located on both sides of the wide corridor, the entrance area of the cinema was connected by an interior "shell" in the form of a wavy flowing sphere, which, bypassing overhead communications and floor slabs of different heights, smoothly passes from one space to another. This sphere is formed by round polished mirrors located along the entire perimeter of the ceiling, which architects place on guides at different angles. From the abundance of mirrors overhead, the eyes diverge in the literal sense, and, as the architects wanted, no direct associations arise - the mesmerizing space can be interpreted as “sea”, and as “cosmic”, and even as “musical”.
Mirrors, some of which are matte, play a key role in the light scenario of the room, namely, they scatter the beams of the searchlights, creating the illusion of light glare of different intensities. As Yulia Tryaskina explains, all the mirrors here are different - both in diameter and along the surface itself: alternating small and large circles and making some of them matte. The latter take on the main directional light and scatter it, and gradually increasing the number of matte surfaces as they move away from the entrance, the architects achieve the effect of gradually disappearing light - and in the water it becomes darker and darker as they dive deeper, but, most importantly, it fits perfectly into a cinema atmosphere where glare is always a hindrance.
The abundance of mirrors tilted at different angles to the ceiling helps to hide the lamps themselves, which gives the resulting space additional intrigue. The same task is performed by the chosen design of the ceiling - it is painted with a dark matte paint, which visually erases the boundaries of the room, creating the illusion of being in a fantastic grotto.
A shell of hundreds of round mirrors, in the development of the concept of which UNK project used three-dimensional software modeling, became the main element of interior decoration, emphasizing the individuality of this particular Luxor IMAX. In such an object as a cinema, with its very rigid, pre-calculated functional scheme, which the architects had to observe, the passage from the ticket offices through the restaurants to the halls, in fact, became for them the only room for maneuvers. And UNK project used it in full, creating a non-standard and at the same time functional interior.
