New Horizons Cinema

Going to the cinema isn’t the enjoyable experience it once was. It starts with you forking out more than a tenner for a ticket to the cheap seats, and continues with you parting with another tenner for three cola bottles and a gummy bear. You are not shown to your seat. No. Some spotty oick points vaguely in the direction of a distant door at the end of an interminable corridor and mumbles “screen 3” as they rip your £10 ticket in two and throw half in the bin. And that’s before even starting on the soulless atmosphere of these meh-tiplex warehouse cash-extractors.

Winding back the reel (that’s what they used before they sacked all the projectionists, kids) to the cinema experience of yesteryear, but with design more like an advanced screening, is the New Horizons Cinema in Wrocław, Poland. We could go into great detail about the 9-screen, 2300-seat arthouse venture, a building wrested from the grip of some cinema chain goliath or other and completely renovated, but it can be more succinctly summarised thus: everything that is wrong with your local Odious has been put right by BUCK.ARCHITEKCI.

Massive plaudits go to the local firm, who put the design together in four weeks, did the work in just six days, and in between managed to find time to custom design almost all the fixtures and fittings. We’d pay ten quid just to walk around the place – watching a film would simply be a nice bonus.