Harkins Camelview occupies 85,000 square feet on the top floor of Scottsdale Fashion Square. Fourteen screens, luxury leather reclining stadium seating, an in-lobby bar and cafe, a coffee and gelato counter, walls of giant stone, moving digital posters — and The Freezer, a private en-suite screening room for up to 24 guests, entered through what looks like a walk-in freezer door.
It is one of the most recognizable theatres in Arizona. It is also one of the more complicated buildings we have delivered, for reasons that have little to do with the finishes.
Building on the top floor of an operating regional mall means the project has a landlord, a schedule, and several hundred neighbors who are open for business. Every material delivery, every crane pick, every noisy demolition or core-drilling operation had to be choreographed around retail hours and mall access. Work that would take an afternoon on a greenfield site becomes a night operation with its own logistics plan.
Structure came with its own constraints. Stadium seating means stepped floors, and stepped floors on an existing elevated deck means load paths that have to be verified rather than assumed. Add fourteen auditoriums of recliner seating — heavier and deeper than traditional theatre seating, with power to every seat — and the coordination between structure, electrical and seating layout becomes the backbone of the job.
Acoustics are where theatre work separates itself. Each auditorium is designed and built to produce no echo, which means isolated wall assemblies, careful attention to every penetration, and mechanical systems that move a lot of air without ever being audible over a quiet scene. A single unsealed conduit sleeve between two houses can undo an entire acoustic package, so the sequencing and inspection of those assemblies is treated as a top-tier discipline.
Then there are the guest-facing systems a modern theatre lives on: a full bar and cafe with commercial kitchen infrastructure, gelato and coffee service, point-of-sale and digital signage networks, and the projection and sound packages themselves. Each has its own vendor, its own commissioning window, and its own opening-day dependency.
The Freezer deserves its own mention. A 24-seat private screening room with a concealed entry is the kind of feature that reads as a gimmick on a plan set and as a signature on opening night. Executing it well is entirely a coordination problem — the hidden door only works if the framing, hardware, finish and adjacent millwork are all built to the same tolerance.
None of this happens without a client relationship that predates the project. Our work with Harkins spans multiple theatres, including Harkins Tempe Marketplace, and that history is why a job with this many moving parts could be run collaboratively rather than adversarially. When owner, architect and contractor have built together before, the hard decisions get made in a phone call instead of a change order.
That is the kind of repeat partnership Double AA Builders is built for. See more of the work on our projects page, or call (480) 994-0400 to talk about yours.
