Changing the Face Competition – Pushkinsky Cinema – Rossiya’s Flourish

By: Lidija Grozdanic | 2011

The project is an entry for “Changing the Face – Moscow 2011,” a competition for ideas to redesign the façade of the famous Pushkinsky Cinema, located in Pushkin Square, Moscow. Designed by Gijo Paul George and Hend Almatrouk the project attempts to capture the collective memory of the square and cinema and traces the trajectory of events as they unfolded. From conditional order to creative chaos, from propaganda and censorship under the communist regime to the hedonistic extravagance of the new Moscow, the trajectory becomes the generator of form, mutating from rigid geometrical edges to the playful and seductive lines of the hem of a pretty girl’s skirt.
A frozen trajectory becoming an urban mnemonic device inspired the design of the new facade for the Pushkinsky cinema. A witness to history’s turbulences and cycles of change, the Pushkinsky (originally Rossiya) personify the very definition of metamorphosis and change. Having much in common with the movies she exhibits, she saw her young days in the limelight as well as a steady decline and fall from grace. Emerging again as the most important cinema in the glamorous new Moscow, it is her time again in the spotlight, only this time with a flourish.