In most movie worlds, the story usually starts in a bustling city. The theme of the design was therefore ‘The City’, and the designers drew inspiration from the aerial view of cities, presenting the hustle and bustle of cities in a figurative way, in the space that interacts with movies.

There are numbers of ‘boxes’ in rectangular or trapezoidal shapes on the ceilings and walls, extending in various heights and angles into the space. This is the image of a bustling metropolis with skyscrapers. The luminaires were concealed, only the light illuminates the straight gaps between the ‘boxes’, like the flowing and shining streets in cities. The lounge and concession area here echo the shape of the ceiling, and people can rest on those staggered blocks of seating as they wait for the film to start. Besides, several LED screens on the ceilings and walls show different images of cities’ architecture to enrich the visual effect of the space.

The designers chose marble as the main material to create the interior. The mottled pattern of marble runs throughout the space, with natural stone used for the floor, the walls, the seating and the bar counter. The ceiling, on the other hand, is a transfer of the stone pattern printed onto the metal panel surface. Using metal panels rather than natural stone to create the ceiling was a result of cost control and weight reduction. 

The designers invested a great deal of time and effort in travelling to Shuitou, Fujian Province, the distribution center for stone in China, not only to find stones that fit the design theme of the project, but also to photograph the clear textures of these stones. In order to get the metal panels closer to the real stone color, they kept experimenting to achieve the most ideal result, from the stringent requirements for the shooting surroundings, to the repetitive printing process of metal panels samples. In the end, the lobby space became a blend of metal panels and real marble, making it impossible to tell the difference between where is the real stone and where is the fake one.

The intersecting roads in the city form small plots of land, and the overall space was considered to be divided in this way at the beginning of the design, so you can see the geometry of the ceilings, the walls and the floor with different alignment, as if they were suddenly withdrawn, but with the connection of forming a surface field with each other. The designers applied this approach to the color separation of the tiles on the wall of the walkway as well.

Considering the effect of materials on sound transmission, instead of using natural marble, the designers chose to create the space with marble patterns printed on the cloth. In order to print the stone pattern as close to the natural state as possible on the cloth, several patterns of samples were compared and adjusted to reach the final result presenting in the space.