Breaking the Fourth Wall: Paramount Cinema Courtenay Place

Abstract

Cinema venues and film festival places are scattered around Wellington and does not unify the film going community and advocate the cinema. Hence, rejuvenation, a new identity or figure is necessary for these niche audiences. The Fourth Wall is also called the proscenium arch which separates the stage from the audience and symbolically the imaginary from the corporeal. The Fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional world of the cinema and, the audience. It is the invisible barrier between fiction and reality. "Breaking the Forth Wall" evolves from the idea to consider Paramount Theatre as an extension of the civic space of Courtenay Place, achieved by blurring and distorting the boundaries. Transforming Paramount Theatre into not just a reiteration of modern cinemas, and by questioning the boundaries such as social and cultural aspect of the diverse community in New Zealand."The Fourth Wall" serves as a tool to give coherence to the city- and an individual identity on Courtenay Place. Space are expanded and contracted within the intervention to create an illusion of scale, enabling the different penetration of lights and shadow within the cinema. One of the profound features is the emptiness in the space created by the expansion. The core of emptiness is meant to invade the occupant so there is room for the light to fill them. The interiority of the design intervention response gives an internal orientation which separates the exteriority of the urban pandemonium. The circular tectonics form of the open-aired isolated environment enables the occupants to have the opportunity to reflect and observe their relationship to the exterior environment. Awareness of the cold, hard solid anchors encloses and stretches the interior helps lead to the recollection that humans are soft and warm.