Location: Galway, Ireland.

Architect: dePaor.

The building is an arthouse cinema in the center of Galway, Ireland, owned by the city and leased commercially. It comprises three screens with a bar and cafe, and is built on the plot of a merchant house and its garden. The Georgian facade is designed for the streetscape, and the building is set behind a small courtyard between the River Corrib and the docks. The building is a series of transfer slabs on discontinuous walls, making a building of staircases, with the rakes expressed in long section to model the space and influence the elevations. The volume is cut away in cross section to allow south light across the interior and open views. The largest room is at the center, surrounded by servant rooms packed into the periphery, naturally lit and cross ventilated. The bar is treated as a hardwood floor which rises as skirting, bench, shelf, counter and screen as a suite of small interconnected rooms of forced perspectives. The cafe is an extension of the ground floor screen folded internally as a hall of mirrors, framed in ebonised sapele. All of the windows are the same size and proportion, with untreated hardwood casements on deep galvanised metal cills. The building is dressed in red fabric, with the bottom draped, the middle ruched, and the top as a theatre, with a shallow stage. The bar and cafe are bespoke, with all light fittings and wayfinding bespoke. The building is designed to be acoustic, thermal, and decorative, with linings expressed independently to become the character of the rooms. All other space is untempered and left exposed as shotblasted concrete. The windows are placed in the interiors to choreograph movement and make atmosphere, with red, green, and amber back projecting by night into the street.

Photo credit: David Grandorge, Peter Maybury.