Designed by Amir Mikhaeil, the new Center for Contemporary Cinema, situated on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Virgil Avenue in Los Angeles, is neither a multiplex nor a museum – it aims to be a new manifold for projection of film and new media within the city. This inspiring design, awarded H.I.Feldman Prize at Yale, has its roots in Tarkovsky’s representation of time in cinema and the Deleuzian conception of the time-image which is not reliant on the linear progression of movement through film, therefore the project disrupts the continuous urban narrative structure of the boulevard.

The dynamic mass of the Center turns as the building rises, creating an internal cascading atrium, directed by two primary hyperbolic surfaces. The theater is consisted of two main blocks – the smaller contains theater faces inwards, while the larger facilitates four theaters with the largest one at the top, facing the city through the proscenium. The projections through the proscenium are visible to gallery visitors and viewers within the atrium.

This refreshing and  playful project of the Cinema was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his understanding of the transition from the movement-image of classical cinema to the time image, further investigated through the design process and incorporated in the very form of the building – in Deleuze’s words, the Time Image is a reversal of the subordination of time to movement, where time ceases to be the measurement of normal movement and it increasingly appears for itself and creates paradoxical movements, therefore Time is out of joint.