Almost ten years on from the spectacular UFA Center in Dresden, Coop Himmelb(l)au are back at the cinema. Helmut Swiczinsky and Wolf D. Prix are the newly announced winners of the competition for an enormous new shopping, exhibition and multiplex cinema in Busan, South Korea.

The main feature of the Austrian team's visionary design is a curved roof that not only functions as a virtual screen but allows films to be screened on both sides, from below for viewers inside the cinema, on the roof for those watching from the balconies of the surrounding houses.

The luxury building, commissioned by the Busan International Film Festival that intends to use it for the festival in 2007 will contain six cinemas, an exhibition hall and a landing for those arriving by sea. E.S.

http://www.coop-himmelblau.at