Third Place Winner of Combo Competitions' London Cinema Challenge. Featured on ArchDaily.

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“We've become a race of Peeping Toms.” Rear Window, 1954.

Like all city dwellers, Londoners live within a constant tension between public and private space. Moments of true privacy are few and far between, so private dramas are often played out in the open: personal conversations within earshot of strangers, intimacy on park benches, arguments, the meeting of friends, and unexpected encounters. As a city or space becomes denser, this experience of public-private overlap intensifies to the point of hyperbole.

Although film-watching is a highly personal and often private event, acting and film production are rooted in life observation. “Peep(le) Show” condenses people-watching, film production, and the finished movies into one space, celebrating cinema from its conception to its consumption. The program is shared by a sound stage during the day and a public cinema at night. It embraces the spillover of the living room into the city, and makes a spectacle of the film goers and film creators as much as of the films.

The enclosed black box of the building disconnects visitors from the familiarity of the city and places them into an introverted world of fantasy and film. The threshold between the two worlds occurs at the facade, which is punctured by the translucent projection screens of street-facing theaters. The building remains smoothly enveloped, but the moving screens hint at the liveliness within.