Republic

Republic is an honorable mention proposal for the reimagining of Moscow's Pushkinsky Cinema Hall, treating the theater facade as both civic surface and urban threshold. The project reasserts the building as a public landmark by extending the experience of the screen beyond the auditorium and back into Pushkinsky Square. A three-dimensional LED curtain wraps the main elevations, turning the cinema into a programmable, low-consumption media facade for trailers, schedules, live broadcasts, and public events.

Rather than a flat billboard, the curtain is shaped as a dense field of lightweight LED bulbs, its topographic waves carving entrances into the luminous volume. Visitors pass through these openings as if moving through the image itself, while a glass wall behind the matrix maintains climate separation and supports the system. Drawing on research by the NOVA team at ETH, the proposal pairs technological spectacle with a civic ambition: to make the theater public again, visible before the curtain rises and active long after the show ends.