(Busan = Yonhap News) Reporter Hyun Kyung-sook = The Busan Cinema Center, located at the point where the sea off Haeundae in Busan, Gwangan Bridge, and Suyeong River meet, has the world's largest cantilever structure roof.
It gives a feeling of overwhelmingness and liberation, as if defying gravity. Thanks to this cantilever roof that seems to be floating in the air, the Busan Cinema Center is considered a representative architectural landmark and work of art in Busan.
◇ Memories of ‘Subi’ (水飛)
The Busan Cinema Center is located in the sophisticated and modern Centum City in Busan.
The area of U-dong, Haeundae-gu, where Centum City, a newly developed district, is located, is where the Suyeong Airfield used to be.
Suyeong Airfield was a military airfield.
The 1,151,000 m2 site where 'Subi' (水飛) was located is home to several cultural facilities and public institutions related to video and media, including the Busan Cinema Center, Busan Museum of Art, Korean Film Council, and Korea Media Rating Board.
BEXCO, where the 2005 Busan Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit was held, is also located in Centum City.
When Pope John Paul II visited Korea in 1984 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean Catholic Church, he took a helicopter and visited Busan via Suyeong Airport.
The Suyeong River soaks Geumjeong-gu, Dongrae-gu, Yeonje-gu, Suyeong-gu, and Haeundae-gu in Busan before flowing into the sea at Suyeong Bay, located between Haeundae and Gwangalli.
The Busan Cinema Center faces the Suyeong River with a road in between.
The hall's plaza is open toward APEC Naru Park and Centum Marina Park on the Suyeong Riverside.
The Busan Cinema Center draws the dynamic flow of Centum City into the plaza and expands it to Suyeong Riverside Park, becoming a link connecting the city center and nature.
The Human Bridge, a 250m long pedestrian bridge, spans over the Suyeong River in front of the Busan Cinema Center.
This bridge, designed with a curved top to symbolize harmony and communication, was completed in 2023 to improve connectivity between the Millak-dong area in Suyeong-gu, the Busan Cinema Center, and Centum City.
◇ The world’s largest ‘cantilever’ roof
The Busan Cinema Center is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the world's largest cantilever structure roof.
A cantilever is a beam structure in which only one end of the roof is fixed to the ground and the other end is floating in the air without being supported.
It is also called a cantilever structure.
The 'Big Roof', the center of the hall, is supported by pillars on only one side of the long roof, and the remaining 85m of the roof is floating in the air.
If you combine the 'Small Roof' and Big Roof, which serve as the roof of the Roof Theater, an outdoor movie theater, the area of the two roofs is 2.5 times the size of a soccer field.
The cantilever structure minimizes columns by precisely calculating the building's center of gravity.
This creates a unique visual effect that defies gravity and creates an open outdoor plaza by removing obstacles that block the view.
The plaza of the hall is open in all directions as there are no exterior walls or doors.
Visitors can enter the hall from any direction.
As you walk around the city, you inadvertently enter a space of film art.
The unique sense of space and overwhelming sense of openness that the theater boasts is in line with the essence of film art, which breaks down boundaries and pursues freedom.
The Busan Cinema Center embodies deconstructionist architectural aesthetics.
By breaking with traditional architectural techniques and rules and pursuing atypical forms, we sought to provide users and visitors with a new spatial experience.
Instead of square buildings, vertical and horizontal, symmetrical and straight lines, curves, asymmetry, and fragmented geometric shapes were used in architecture.
The Cinema Center was designed by the Austrian architectural design firm Coop Himmelbrau, which was selected through an international contest, and was built from 2008 to 2011 at a cost of 167.9 billion won.
It consists of three buildings, ‘Cine Mountain’, ‘Beef Hill’, and ‘Double Cone’, with an area of 32,137㎡ and a total floor area of 54,335㎡. The three buildings are connected by a sky bridge.
◇ One bleacher chair costs 1 million won.
Sky Theater, projection room, library
The main performance hall of Cine Mountain, the main building of the Busan Cinema Center, is the Haneul Theater, which is renowned for its good acoustics.
In a performance hall, the audience becomes an element of sound absorption.
Because of this, the performance sound often varies between rehearsals and the actual performance, and the chairs at Haneul Theater were specially manufactured to reduce this variation.
Special chairs absorb as much sound as an audience member, even during rehearsals without an audience.
The price of each chair in this 800-seat concert hall is about 1 million won.
As I entered the projection room of Roof Theater, an outdoor movie theater, the recently introduced high-tech projector caught my attention.
This equipment is the latest projector that supports both digital projection and film projection.
Nowadays, film screenings have almost disappeared, and thanks to this projector, you can experience the unique texture and emotion of analog films.
The open space of the Roof Theater and cutting-edge projection equipment combine to create a highly immersive viewing environment.
The device that controls the media facades installed on the ceilings of the big roof and small roof was also located next to the projector.
The media façade installed under the ceilings of both roofs boasts the world's largest roof-integrated media façade, with over 120,000 LED lights tightly embedded.
The film library is always full.
The bookshelf was filled with popular books and professional books related to movies.
You can choose what you want from the database of classic movies, independent movies, genre movies, etc. and watch it from a single audience seat.
There was also a music corner where you could listen to LPs.
The Busan Cinema Center stands in the center of Centum City, a forest of high-rise apartments.
It is hard to tell how many 'Cinema Kids', who have been fascinated by movies since childhood and dream of becoming directors and critics, are blooming around the theater.
◇ Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) exclusive screening theater
It is no exaggeration to say that the Busan Cinema Center was born due to the success of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), which started in 1996.
As BIFF became a major international film festival, the need for a dedicated screening theater increased, so the Busan Cinema Center was launched.
BIFF's physical base, the Busan Cinema Center, is strengthening its status as the center of the Asian film industry.
Around the hall, a cluster of film, video, and media-related institutions and facilities is formed, including the Korea Film Council (KOFIC), the Korea Video Industry Center (BVIC), the Korea Media Rating Board (KMRB), the Game Rating Board (GRAC), Busan Viewers Media Center, Busan Content Korea Lab, and Busan Cultural Contents Complex (BCC).
KNN Broadcasting Station, Dongseo University Centum Campus, Sohyang Musical Theater, Im Kwon Taek College of Film and Arts, and Busan Film Post-Production Facility are also notable.
Busan was the first UNESCO City of Film and Creative Arts to be designated in Asia in 2014.
The Busan Cinema Center symbolizes that Busan is a city of movies.
※ This article can also be found in the October 2026 issue of the monthly ‘Yonhap Imagine’ published by Yonhap News.
