Jian Li Ju Theatre, Shanghai Interior Design Development, Chinese Entertainment Venue, Architecture Images
Jian Li Ju Theatre in Shanghai
Commercial Interior Development in China ? design by More Design Office
12 Mar 2018
Jian Li Ju Theatre
Architects: More Design Office (MDO)
Location: B1 No. 301 East Hongsong Road, Minhang District, Shanghai, China
Jian Li Ju Theatre

The Jianliju theatre company, in an interesting examination of typology, offers a unique spectator experience where the audience plays an integral part of the performances and productions. As such the brief for their new premises in Shanghai demands a careful architectural approach to the relationships between space, event and movement. MDO, the architects selected to take on this mantle, have addressed these conditions with a deliberate and exaggerated exploration of form, lighting and circulation.
The practice has taken the cinematic expression of film noir and applied its heightened sense of drama to the atmosphere within to create a sequence of contrasting spaces that read as a montage of screenshots from a film reel.

With work of this nature, the architectural theory of Tschumi, especially the 1976 Screenplays project, is never far away and many of the formal strategies employed by MDO directly reference the parallels with screen editing and the time-space nature of architecture. Tools such as distortion, repetition and superimposition often used by the great directors of the film noir scene have all...