Cinema Futurismo: A Circular Auditorium That Replaces the Screen with Space

What happens when you remove the screen from a cinema? Not the image, but the flat, rectangular surface that has dictated how audiences sit, where they look, and how architecture arranges itself around them for over a century. Cinema Futurismo answers by centering a holographic projection system inside a transparent dome, seating spectators in concentric rings around it, and dissolving the boundary between interior spectacle and exterior landscape. The screen doesn't disappear. It becomes volumetric, occupying the middle of the room rather than terminating it.

The project was a shortlisted entry in the Cinema Futurismo competition. Designed by Karolina Garkowska, Patka R, Klaudia Peda, and Team Students (UTP), the proposal imagines a speculative cinema pavilion set within a landscaped terrain of mature trees, winding paths, and water. Its ribbed glass dome rises from this topography as both a civic landmark and a spatial instrument, housing an auditorium that rejects the linear room in favor of a circular, immersive field.

Concentric Seating Around a Holographic Core

The interior breaks fundamentally with the frontal logic of conventional cinemas. Instead of rows aimed at a distant wall, ribbed blue seating terraces descend in concentric rings toward a central projection platform. The contoured seats recline in fluid profiles that sit somewhere between armchair and lounge, encouraging visitors to settle into position rather than perch upright. Mobile partitions between seating zones allow spectators to modulate their privacy, introducing a domestic quality into a public entertainment space. You remain part of the collective event while adjusting the degree of intimacy around you.

The circular plan eliminates the hierarchy of front and back that defines every traditional theater. There is no best seat in the house because there is no singular axis. Every viewer has a balanced spatial relationship to the projected content at the center. The wide interior views reveal the scale of this arrangement: tiered aisles curve gently, visitors descend at various points around the circumference, and the blue-striped upholstery unifies the entire auditorium into a single, continuous surface. It reads less like a theater and more like a landscape shaped for looking.

The Dome as Both Structure and Event

From the outside, the ribbed glass dome announces itself without shouting. Its transparent panels and structural ribs create a pavilion that feels permeable, more greenhouse than bunker. Concrete steps and pathways lead visitors through mature trees and flowering shrubs toward the entrance, integrating the approach into a broader landscape sequence. The architecture doesn't sit on the ground so much as emerge from it, with graded terrains and planted edges softening the transition between path and building.

The frontal approach view makes the transparency legible: you can see into the dome before you enter it. This inverts the typical cinema's opacity, where the building's exterior tells you nothing about the experience inside. Here the structure is part of the visual proposition, a preview of the spatial logic within. The ribs themselves do double duty, providing structural depth while filtering daylight into rhythmic patterns across the interior surfaces.

Landscape as Architectural Ground

The aerial view reveals a critical design strategy that the ground-level perspectives only hint at. The white ribbed dome is not placed on a flat site but nestled within sculpted terraces and winding pedestrian paths that extend toward a nearby body of water. The circular geometry of the building radiates outward into the landscape through concentric planting rings and graded walkways. Topography, architecture, and nature are not three separate systems layered on top of each other; they are integrated into a single composition where each reinforces the logic of the circle.

This landscape integration matters because it reframes what a cinema's site relationship could be. Conventional theaters turn their backs on their surroundings, sealing out the world to control light and sound. Cinema Futurismo does the opposite. It uses the site as an extension of the cinematic experience, blurring the edge between the building's interior atmosphere and the terrain that delivers you to it.

After Dark: Light as Projection Beyond Projection

The dusk rendering is the project's most compelling image. Blue light rings glow through the transparent ribbed panels, transforming the dome into a luminous object against the evening sky. The building itself becomes a kind of screen, projecting its interior event outward to the surrounding landscape. This is where the design's ambitions crystallize: cinema is not just something that happens inside this structure. The architecture broadcasts it.

The rendered night condition also clarifies the holographic concept at the core. A luminous three-dimensional figure is shown rising above the central platform while the dome frames the sky beyond. Architecture, projection, audience, and landscape overlap visually. The flat screen is gone, and with it, the spatial passivity that has defined cinema interiors for generations. What replaces it is a room that performs.

Why This Project Matters

Cinema Futurismo works because it treats its speculative technology (holographic projection) not as a gadget to be housed but as a spatial catalyst that reorganizes every other decision: plan geometry, seating typology, site strategy, enclosure transparency. The circular auditorium is not a formal gesture for its own sake. It is the logical consequence of removing the screen-wall and asking what kind of room a volumetric image actually needs. That disciplined chain of reasoning, from concept to spatial organization, elevates the project above generic futurism.

For Garkowska, Patka R, Peda, and their UTP collaborators, the shortlisted entry demonstrates a capacity to rethink a familiar building type from its most basic assumptions. The conventional cinema has remained spatially inert for decades while the technologies it contains have evolved dramatically. Projects like this one argue, persuasively, that architecture should catch up.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Karolina Garkowska, Patka R

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Cinema Futurismo by Karolina Garkowska, Patka R Cinema Futurismo (uni.xyz).