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Cold Mountain Adaptive Reuse of Banaux House into an Arthouse Cinema “Where there is nothing, everything is possible; When there is architecture, nothing is possible. “ S Imaginging Metropolis Nothingness

“What more important than the design of architectures is the design of their decay”. As big cities grow, aged buildings are being abandoned – their out of dated attached infrastructural equipment no longer satisfies updated needs – rapidly, too rapid for a thorough purge, thus lots of tiny emptiness merged downtown in the past century. Like a set of void in metropolis crowded context, emptiness in metropolis is not empty though, that each void can be used for every program as an effort for insertion of diversity that stands out in both urban activity and texture.

Cold Mountain, the project that adaptively reuse of Banaux House into an Arthouse Cinema, was previously a void in metropolitan solid, however, a valuable one. Banaux House was built by Russian noble Banaux Brothers during conquer colonization in the early 1900s, and has become an exotic architectural landscape where archipelago of other exotic architectural islands floats, which, as aging, gradually grew into a highly charged nothingness: the old brick and wood amalgam ended up in ruin simply because they are no longer needed, physically, while emotionally they are carrying memories of generations of residents, and has been regarded as nostalgia symbol of the city’s prosperous ages long before rotten. That’s why Banaux House is the part deserves reinforcement, not destruction.