County Theater Competition

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Exterior view daylight

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The County Theater has a very strong and characteristic urban image, probably rooted in the memory of its patrons and neighbors, but also of the citizens who passes by every day. The project aim is to propose not only a new facade but a place for the citizens of Doylestown to enjoy. A place that takes into account its history and memory through the repetition of an element that is part of the collective imagination of the theater's users.

We decided that the new expansion should borrow from that strong identity, so some characteristic elements of the building were used for the composition of the addition. The aim is to construct a building that is not completely strange and alien in the eyes of the local people, but to raise a dialogue between the existing and the new, between the classic town theater and the current needs and contemporary technologies.

We choose the geometric yellow facade pattern of the existing building as the element that would build and define the new design, then from that element a 3D pattern was defined, and in its repetition and combination the new facade is created. A facade that was given thickness in order to generate not only the new enclosure, but a new outdoor public space, a place to meet before or after the movie, a place for the city.

This design made of dozens of ‘’windows’’ represents one of the virtues of the cinema, the possibility to know new worlds, new cultures, and different points of views.

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Exterior night view