LEGO Build: Hotel-to-Church-to-Movie Theater

All day Saturday (from noon to past 6AM this morning), I worked on upgrading/redesigning the city’s movie house. The previous design was based on a MOC of the Boutique Hotel set into a community church by Yanix. In that design I saw that he’d built a large auditorium with seating and a balcony area with an organ to be used during services, and a rooftop visitors area. I thought that I could adapt that general layout to build a movie theater with a balcony and rooftop cafe.

Original “community church” design by Yanix

Two big challenges presented themselves right away. The first was that as a community church having lots of windows and a vaulted ceiling with lots of windows can add to the beauty of the building, but that would be a problem for a movie theater. So I had to order blacked-out windows for all of the windows, except the two in the front entrance. The second challenge was the I needed to cut into the size of the main auditorium so that I could have a lobby and snack bar and a wall running the width of the building to block the lobby from the viewing room. Adding the lobby resulted in only having two rows of seats in the main room to accommodate only 11 movie viewers, and even then the “lobby” was barely the size of a hallway. The seating in the balcony was also a bit challenged because you couldn’t put seats where they can’t clearly see the screen, so only one row of seats wrapped around the railing.

Movie Theater redesign 1.0 by JBB

A third issue that I had with my adaption of the design was that it had a great vaulted ceiling with a beautiful bell tower, but all of that “space” felt unused because I couldn’t put seats up there… or could I? In my current redesign I made the whole first floor into the lobby, snack bar and restroom area (three regular and one handicap facilities with floor to ceiling privacy and their own sinks). I moved the main auditorium to the second floor, expanded the size of the screen to almost the full width of the building and added a third row of seats, with the potential of adding a fourth row. I moved the balcony up to the third floor and expanded the interior part of the building to the full width of the building and made the balcony a straight single row instead of trying to wrap seating around the top floor.

I kept most of the design elements of the original MOC and my theater redesign, but I got rid of a second floor door that would led to a front balcony (I guess for the priest in the original MOC design to bless the gathered crowd outside…). I eliminated the roof top cafe (which would have been difficult to get to with the wobbly stairs that were used in the design), I took the sand green roof design that was part of the vaulted ceiling and placed in the front of the third floor and kept the bell tower. I order tile pieces to finish the lobby floor and tile up the main auditorium. I need to add movie poster to the exterior and interior of the theater and add a huge sign out front. Given the building’s former heritage I’m thinking of calling it either “Temple Cinema,” or “Cinema Temple.” What do you think?