Art Pavilion M by Studio Ossidiana is a museum afloat

(Image credit: Riccardo de Vecchi)

Art Pavilion M is a serene composition of circles, peacefully floating amid the green expanses of Almere – a ‘new town’ in the Netherlands built in the 1980s on reclaimed land that was once the Zuider sea. It is this history of earth and water, combined with nods to local landmarks and natural formations, that the museum’s creator, Rotterdam-based Studio Ossidiana, references through its design, now open to the public.

The commission came through an invited competition for a museum of land art and multimedia in October 2020, organised by the city of Almere. Drawing on the site's context was important for the design development – while adding layers of storytelling, imagination and the studio's signature take on geometries and patterns enriched the final product. ‘In this context, we imagined the museum and its outside areas as a sequence of three tangential rings: the “Port”, the “Stage”, and the “‘Observatory”,’ explain Studio Ossidiana's co-founders, Alessandra Covini and Giovanni Bellotti.

Art Pavilion M: a museum afloat

Art Pavilion M by Studio Ossidiana in its natural and suburban context

The three rings clearly identified in the composition correspond to these notions, acting as entryway, protection, exhibition hall and event space all at once. The enclosed ring, made of lightweight timber and polycarbonate panels, loosely resembles a greenhouse, reflecting through its mesmerising skin the surrounding vegetation and water. Meanwhile, a ‘Surf and Turf’ terrazzo inside, made with local shells and horticultural supplies, adds layers to the composition, again drawing in the context.

Say Covini and Bellotti: ‘We thought of the museum of land art and multimedia, as a place that could give the possibilities to display, interact and perform on water, to work as a port for art, but also literally as a port, where boats or other floating installations may dock, or inhabit its enclosed pond; a place that will remain public even when the museum is closed, becoming a place to be circumnavigated by canoes, or where [people can] fish and swim in the summer and ice skate in winter.’

Green curtains and pink interiors at Art Pavilion M

Green interior installation at Art Pavilion M

INFORMATION
studio-ossidiana.com

Ellie Stathaki is the Architecture & Environment Director at Wallpaper*. She trained as an architect at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and studied architectural history at the Bartlett in London. Now an established journalist, she has been a member of the Wallpaper* team since 2006, visiting buildings across the globe and interviewing leading architects such as Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas. Ellie has also taken part in judging panels, moderated events, curated shows and contributed in books, such as The Contemporary House (Thames & Hudson, 2018), Glenn Sestig Architecture Diary (2020) and House London (2022).

With contributions from

Riccardo de Vecchi - Photography