The Pushkinsky Cinema proposal is rooted firmly in the desire to maintain the integrity of the urban plaza facing Tverskaya and extend its popularity as an icon in Moscow City. While the venue is currently successful as an urban destination and social junction, it lacks the architectural gravity that its cinematic heritage suggests. This proposal aims to ensure its stature in the years to come at the forefront of international film sites.

The intent through the design is to set the plaza façade as a foil to the east / west faces to create interest, difference, and contrast. The longer side facades are subdued, linear, quiet, and punctuated with integrated signage. The plaza however, is in stark contrast to ambitions of the sides, seeing that austerity fall away, revealing nuance, color and material difference.

From a site standpoint, the necessity of elevating patrons over the road, and up to the entry is focal. This proposal maintains the intent of the original cinema, but uses the civic scale circulation to house moments of repose to serve a dual purpose. The first is to allow opportunity for congregation and interaction on a day-today basis, and secondly, to allow for spaces outbound of the primary circulation when the cinema’s primary event is elevated to a national or international level. These spaces will allow one to see, and be seen on the red carpet.

The front façade employs the use of two DuPont products as double skin of sorts. The outer is Corian exterior cladding, panelized as a frame, and systematically inflected inward to the entry. As this façade can be seen not only in elevation, but obliquely as well, the frame’s faces are coded differently according to RGB (red, green and blue) values – a hint to the primary light colors needed to create white light, and subsequently the projected motion picture. These produce an array of affect as one moves around and through the façade. The Corian system is backed up by a Sentry glass curtain wall, which provides the thermal enclosure for the space.

This proposal reflects a civic presence akin to the Russian persona – one that is at once quiet and stoic, and at others full of life and color.