Basildon Cinema, UK

With its ten cinemas and six restaurants, the East Square leisure complex in Basildon in Essex is part of an ambitious master plan to restore the town centre’s appeal by creating daytime and evening entertainment and dining opportunities. Partly inspired by the city’s artistic past, when Basildon was known for its 1960s ceramic murals, the building also evokes the modern edge of digital images. The set of multicoloured hexagonal cassettes designed by Pollard Thomas Edwards’ architects in London evokes the shape of coloured pixels in the digital images projected on the cinema’s screens. This combination of four surface coverings - AZENGAR®, ANTHRA-ZINC®, QUARTZ-ZINC®, GOLD lacquered zinc - and two types of installation - MOZAIK® cassettes and hexagonal shingles - on some 4,000 m2 of facades creates a playful and dynamic effect. A future image is coming into view. The irregularity of the facade’s upper edge is a good illustration of the city’s urban renewal project; it seems to show that the city’s future is still being constructed and rewritten in this very place.