The Alésia – Cinema Steeped in History

In 2011, the Gaumont-Pathé group decided to renovate the existing building in order to upgrade the cinemas and to improve user comfort. This was part of a broader scheme to gradually update the image of their chain of cinemas, which often occupy exceptional city-centre sites, but suffered from being seen as old-fashioned. The aim is to transform them into high-quality cultural venues, animated day and night, and sufficiently flexible to accommodate a varied programme, mixing cinema with other cultural events: the image of the city cinema was to be entirely rethought.

Through this project, Gaumont-Pathé aims to open a whole new chapter for its cinema architecture, a chapter that is contemporary and innovative, where the accent is on comfort as well as audio and visual quality for the film theatres themselves, but also on original and generous public spaces for before and after the film.

The Alésia multi-screen cinema is on the edge of a large urban space. Its main facade faces due west onto the broad Boulevard du Général Leclerc, a major thoroughfare in southern Paris. The building now comprises eight screens and occupies a fairly deep site, with a second facade on the side street, Rue d’Alésia. The main facade on Boulevard du Général Leclerc is long (about 25 metres), and framed by two adjacent buildings, very different from one another: a seven-storey apartment building to the right, a two-storey, mixed-use building to the left.

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Materials provided by Manuelle Gautrand Architecture