Inside Festival 2015: One Plus Partnership co-founder Virginia Lung explains how the interior design firm created a cinema that looks like a disaster scene from a science-fiction movie (+ movie).
One Plus Partnership's Exploded cinema in Wuhan, China, won the Civic, Culture and Transport category at Inside Festival 2015.
The Hong Kong-based interior design firm arranged angular blocks in different sizes and materials to create the impression that a huge explosion had taken place in the space.
"We have all of these rectangular boxes at different scales for different spaces," Lung explains in our latest movie from Inside Festival. "We wanted to create a big explosion. You can see all of these columns and pillars, they seem like they are falling apart."
Lung says that the idea was to create a space that feels like it could be from a science-fiction film.
"It has this futuristic look and we wanted to bring it to the extreme and make it really surreal," she explains. "We used black and white because we want customers to focus on the form rather than a fancy colour."
One Plus Partnership used large boxes to create the ticket booths, while smaller angled blocks were used to make everything from seating areas to washbasins.
Most of the forms throughout the cinema are made from metal, but Lung says solid-surface material Corian was used for the ticket counters "because it's easier to maintain."
The walls and ceiling of the cinema auditorium itself are covered with thousands of blocks of sound-absorbing foam.
"All the boxes are made of acoustic panels," Lung says. "This acoustic material looks like felt, it's very soft when you touch it. We used 1600 grey boxes in six different modules at different angles."
Lung says that the cinema has been a great success so far and is especially popular with young people.
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"It is right next to a university, so a lot of students like to hang out there," she explains. "Even children like it, because all these angled boxes they are just slides for them. They like to play there."
This movie was produced by Dezeen for Inside Festival. It was filmed at Inside Festival 2015 in Singapore. All photographs are courtesy of One Plus Partnership, unless otherwise stated.
Inside Festival 2015 took place in Singapore from 4 to 6 November, alongside partner event World Architecture Festival. Dezeen is media partners for both events and will be publishing more video interviews with the category winners over the coming weeks.