Cinema as a form of entertainment has been battered by successive waves of technological innovation, from TV to home video players to online streaming and the iPad. Despite all this, cinema refuses to die and, in some quarters at least, appears to be reviving and evolving.
The Hackney Picturehouse has recently been converted from a run-down music venue by
Fletcher Priest Architects.
This particular conversion has created four cinema screens, a café area that opens on to the town square, two bars, and a live music venue. In the spirit of the age, and I say this to mean this latest age of cinema as well as the environmentally conscious time in which we live, all kinds of joinery work, acoustic panels and fixtures and fittings have been reused, renovated and re-imagined. The new interventions are modern and crisp in their detail and the materials used include fair-faced concrete that contrasts with the signage to create a consistent graphical quality throughout.
