KINETIC CINEMA: An Auditorium That Moves With the Film It Projects

For more than a century, the cinema auditorium has done one job extremely well: it disappears. Darkness, fixed rows, tuned acoustics and a single luminous rectangle keep the room still so the image can move. KINETIC CINEMA breaks that contract. It proposes a room whose walls, projection surfaces and seats move with the film, so that motion on screen gains a physical counterpart in the space around the audience.

Designed by Justin Acevedo, the project was recognized as an Editor's Choice entry in the Cinema Futurismo competition. Its central question is direct: what happens when cinematic movement is no longer confined to projected pixels? Acevedo's answer is a rounded, enclosed cinema room in which virtual imagery and mechanical movement operate as one spatial system, and the building itself becomes a participant in the story.

When the Image Leaves the Frame and Enters the Room

The opening rendering sets the tone. A great white shark passes overhead while viewers sit in enclosed egg chairs facing a dark, curved screen. The image no longer stays on the wall in front of them; it has migrated above their heads. This is the project's first and most important move. A conventional cinema produces motion visually inside a static shell. KINETIC CINEMA reverses the logic and gives the enclosure the ability to expand, contract, bend, tilt and shift as a sequence unfolds.

The examples in the brief make the intent concrete. A crashing wave could appear to push the boundary of the room toward the audience, and an underwater environment could seem to extend past the limits of a flat screen. Changes in depth, scale and direction on screen are translated into changes in the room's geometry. The architecture stops framing the narrative and starts performing it.

A Room Without a Front Row Hierarchy

The next two renderings show what happens when the frontal screen dissolves. Humpback whales breach across the curved wall as a child in a striped shirt points out from the seats; in the following view, a whale glides through shafts of sunlight above three empty chairs while a single arm reaches upward. In both scenes the eye is pulled sideways and up, not straight ahead. The audience's attention is directed across the room rather than fixed on one surface.

Acevedo structures this through a hierarchy of primary and secondary projection surfaces wrapped around a rounded interior. Different zones of the enclosure take on different roles during a sequence, so projected environments can surround the seating field instead of concentrating everything at one end. The spectator moves from looking at a cinematic world toward sitting inside one. The permanent architectural backdrop disappears, because the backdrop is now the thing that changes.

Pistons Behind the Screen, Drama in Front of It

A submarine and an underwater explosion fill the screen while a row of viewers reacts in their seats. This is exactly the kind of sequence where the project's mechanics are meant to take over. The technical diagrams describe the projection boundary as a flexible membrane carried on a structural frame, with sections that move independently so the wall can shift between relatively flat and dynamically curved states. Sliding, pivoting and tilting movements reorient individual surfaces, while mechanical pistons behind the membrane extend and retract at specific points to reshape the wall in response to the film.

The strength of this idea is that the wall becomes an instrument rather than a canvas. An explosion is not only shown, it can be registered as a change in the shape of the room. That is a meaningful shift in how cinema architecture might be authored: the spatial choreography would need to be written alongside the edit, which suggests a new kind of collaboration between filmmakers and the designers of the room.

The Section as Evidence of a Workable Room

The section drawing grounds the spectacle in something buildable. It shows the rounded theater with projector beams fanning across the interior, exit doors at the edges, a row of red chairs and dimension lines tying the composition together. The drawing makes clear that the curved enclosure is not a rendering effect; it is a deliberate volume organized around projection angles, seating and circulation.

Including the exits and projector geometry matters. It signals that Acevedo is thinking about the auditorium as a working building as well as an immersive experience, and it gives the kinetic system a defined shell in which to operate. The section is the quiet drawing in the set, but it is the one that makes the others credible.

Why This Project Matters

Immersive media has largely chased its goals through screens: bigger, wider, wrapped around the viewer, or strapped to the face. KINETIC CINEMA takes a more architectural route. It asks the room to move, and in doing so it reclaims a role for architecture in a medium that has spent decades trying to make the building invisible. The proposal treats walls, surfaces and seats as cinematic tools with the same narrative weight as light and sound.

As an Editor's Choice entry in Cinema Futurismo, the project is most valuable as a provocation. Its renderings sell the experience, its diagrams of pistons and flexible membranes sketch a plausible mechanism, and its section anchors the idea in a real volume. Together they argue that the future of cinema may depend less on what is projected and more on how the space receiving the projection is willing to respond.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Justin Acevedo

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: KINETIC CINEMA by Justin Acevedo Cinema Futurismo (uni.xyz).