Shoreditch, buzzing with creatives and City workers alike, rarely pauses for breath. But head to the east London enclave this summer and you'll find a moment of respite amid the chaos: a new pavilion in Principal Place, imagined by Athens and New York-based design duo Objects of Common Interest. Commissioned by Brookfield Properties and co-curated with Alter-Projects, the installation runs from June through September as part of the London Festival of Architecture 2026, joining a lineage of ambitious temporary structures at the site by the likes of Simone Brewster, Foster + Partners and John Booth.

Objects of Common Interest co-founder Eleni Petaloti describes the installation, entitled ‘Colour Field’, as 'part landscape, part modern ruin, part meeting place'. The work is a series of geometric blocks arranged across the plaza, hewn from various types of stone. They sit at all angles, some low to the ground and others rising up to two metres. It is not a single object but a composition – one that shifts with the light and angle from which you approach. Pampas grass softens the edges and reinforces the sense that the structure has simply always been here, open to the elements.

What gives ‘Colour Field’ its particular resonance is the provenance of its materials. The installation is constructed entirely from unpolished marble, quartzite and travertine sourced from Solid Nature – surplus stock, offcuts and remnants of unrealised projects from Brazil and Iran to Italy, China, Spain and Turkey. Rather than concealing these origins, Objects of Common Interest celebrates them, reworking discarded pieces into a collage-like composition that feels simultaneously ancient and freshly assembled.

‘As designers, architects and artists, we fundamentally disagree with the idea of a “rejected” natural material. We don't accept the notion that a piece of stone can somehow be considered unworthy,’ says Petaloti. ‘So we went through the Solid Nature archives and created this composition based on what we found.

‘Working with salvaged materials did not feel like a limitation,’ she adds. ‘Instead, it became a process of composition, similar to that of a painter working with a palette of colours. Each stone contributed different qualities, and the way they were arranged shaped the final experience.'

At a formal level, the blocky massing of the work functions as an extruded cityscape – a scaled-down skyline brought to human proportion. 'If you imagine viewing a city from a helicopter, you see these large buildings and volumes. Here, those forms have been scaled down into something that feels welcoming and accessible,' explains Petaloti.

That accessibility is literal as well as conceptual. The blocks double as seating – and workers from the surrounding offices, residents from nearby buildings and passers-by are taking full advantage, making the structure genuinely usable rather than merely decorative. Throughout the summer, meditation sessions and other programming will take place around the pavilion, deepening engagement with the space.

'Whether you are taking a break from work in the nearby offices or simply stepping away from daily life, you can come and sit within the artwork. By touching these materials, you are momentarily reconnected with nature, even in the heart of London,’ Petaloti continues. ‘The main protagonist of the plaza is not the artwork itself; it is the visitor. The viewer becomes the central figure within the work.’

It is a philosophy that both Petaloti and Brookfield Properties adhere to: treating public space not as a backdrop, but as a cultural resource: ‘We never want visitors to stand in awe of our work from a distance. We want them to feel welcome within it,' she says. 'We are not seeking admiration; we are seeking inclusion.’

In a neighbourhood defined by its contradictions, ‘Colour Field’ makes a virtue of exactly that – disparate parts, brought together, forming an unlikely whole.

'Colour Field' is on display at Principal Place, Shoreditch, London EC2A until September 2026. Entry is free.

Read our full guide to London Festival of Architecture 2026

Concéntrico 2026 is opening its doors from 18-23 June, and the northern Spanish city of Logroño is in fervent preparation. Now in its 12th iteration, the architecture festival remains relatively small by some metrics – typically comprising about 20-25 lifesize installations each year within a place of just 150,000 inhabitants – but its immersive, city-wide nature has attracted rich responses from global, emerging and established studios alike.

Founded by architect Javier Peña Ibañez, who serves as its director – and supreme driving force – this is an event conceived, at its core, to celebrate participation and urban space. Its mission? To bring architecture out of its bubble, into the city, and invite all its residents to engage with it as part of their daily life. It draws big names, too, with MVRDV, Konstantin Grcic and Studio Ossidiana having taken part in past editions.

Concéntrico 2026: who, what, where

For Concéntrico 2026, 32 participants will create 24 installations. These will be, as in past years, spread across the city of Logroño, built on public sites, available for all to engage with – intentionally or casually, as part of the city's daily life. Participants include 2026 Pritzker Prize winner Smiljan Radić Clarke, AAU Anastas, 2050+, Future Firm, DC DF, PPAA and Taelon7 (whose past work includes the new Accra pavilion Limbo Engawa). The festival will run 18-23 June 2026.

Curious to learn more? We spoke to Javier Peña Ibañez to delve into the details and help you navigate the world's biggest small architecture festival.

Concéntrico: history and mission

Wallpaper*: What is Concéntrico?

Javier Peña Ibañez: Concéntrico is an international festival of architecture and design founded in Logroño in 2015. From the beginning, I was interested in participation and in discovering alternative forms of urban spatial practice that could connect cities more closely to the people who live in them. At that time, I was already working independently through installations and temporary projects in public space, but I felt there were many architects, artists and designers exploring similar questions without really having a shared platform for dialogue.

I also found it surprising that cities were full of festivals dedicated to music, theatre, cinema or literature, while architecture – something everyone experiences every day – often remained confined to professional circles. Concéntrico emerged from the desire to make architecture accessible again, not as an abstract discipline but as something real, physical and collective.

One thing that still defines the festival today is that everything happens at a 1:1 scale. There are no models or speculative renderings; the projects are built directly in the city. People can enter them, touch them, play with them, ignore them or completely reinvent how they are used. That direct encounter changes the relationship people have not only with architecture, but with the city itself.

Concéntrico's evolution

W*: How has Concéntrico changed over the years, from its first iteration to the celebration it is today?

JP-I: The first editions were much smaller and more intuitive. We mainly worked in courtyards and small spaces in the historic centre of Logroño, trying to reveal hidden urban qualities or overlooked heritage. But very quickly we realised that if we wanted to change the way people related to public space, we also had to work where everyday life was actually happening.

That shift changed the festival enormously. Over the years we moved into parks, peripheral neighbourhoods, parking lots, riverbanks, vineyards and large public squares. We started working not only with architecture as an object, but with architecture as a way of producing encounters, conversations and new uses for familiar places.

At the same time, the themes became broader. Concéntrico today includes climate adaptation, sound, performance, accessibility, collective rituals, educational programmes and long-term urban processes. Some installations disappear after a week, but others leave traces behind: a new use, a new name, a memory or even the beginning of a permanent transformation. That tension between temporary action and long-term impact has become fundamental to the festival.

Over the years, Concéntrico has also made us understand that the street is not simply a transit space or an urban backdrop. It is a place of learning. It is where people negotiate how to live together, where identities are performed, where rituals emerge, where conflict becomes visible and where forms of belonging are constantly constructed and contested.

Public space is political not only because demonstrations happen there, but because everyday life happens there. Children learn how to relate to others there. Communities recognise themselves there. Differences become visible there. Architecture, in that sense, is never neutral. Even temporary interventions can alter the atmosphere of a place, the way people move through it, or the kinds of encounters that become possible within it.

Highlights over the years

W*: Could you pick some highlights from past festivals for us?

JP-I: I usually remember projects less as isolated objects and more as situations that changed how people occupied the city. One project that I often return to is Pabellón 1973–2021 by Lanza Atelier [the architects behind the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion in London]. It transformed Rafael Moneo’s town hall square through an experimental use of curved brickwork, creating a temporary civic structure that completely altered the perception of one of Logroño’s most recognisable urban spaces. It demonstrated how a familiar material could be used in a completely unexpected way.

Another project I often think about is Types of Spaces by Palma and Hanghar. Installed in the passage of the former tobacco factory of La Rioja, the intervention reconstructed the emptiness of the site through a sequence of brick rooms open to the sky. What was interesting was not only the architecture itself, but the way it altered the scale and atmosphere of public space.

The project introduced domestic proportions into an urban passageway, allowing visitors to inhabit the installation rather than simply cross it. Water mist, crushed brick flooring and the mass of the ceramic walls transformed movement through the space into something slower and more intimate. It explored how architecture can completely change the emotional reading of a place using very elemental means: brick, proportion, repetition and atmosphere.

I would also highlight The Garden of Intersections by Studio Ossidiana, which transformed an overlooked urban site into a landscape of encounters between people, plants and non-human forms of life. It was one of those projects that expanded our understanding of what architecture can be: less an object and more an ecology of relationships.

For me, these projects are important because they show that temporary architecture can create lasting shifts in perception. Sometimes the installation disappears completely, but the way people understand a place never returns to what it was before.

Concéntrico 2026: theme and more

W*: Let’s move to this year. What’s in store for this year’s festival?

JP-I: This year’s edition is structured around three curatorial lines: Identity and Fiction, Urban Ecologies and Ephemeral Agents.

Identity and Fiction emerged from a question that has accompanied the festival for years: how do we build a sense of belonging? Cities are full of inherited symbols, rituals and narratives that shape how we understand ourselves collectively. The projects in this section look at temporary architecture as a way of producing new stories, drawing from regional costumes, travelling circuses, celebrations, ceremonies and popular traditions. Rather than treating identity as something fixed, they understand it as something constantly performed, negotiated and reinvented.

Smiljan Radić Clarke’s Circo, for example, imagines a fragile travelling circus installed on soft ground in the historic centre of the city, recalling temporary architectures associated with itinerancy, gathering and spectacle. Matilde Cassani Studio’s project at the Arco de San Bernabé takes inspiration from the traditional regional costume of La Rioja, using textile references and ceremonial forms to explore the relationship between folklore, fiction and urban identity.

Urban Ecologies focuses on climate, landscape, material reuse, depaving and adaptation processes within the city. Ephemeral Agents looks at temporary architecture as a tool for activating social relations through sound, movement, accessibility and collective participation.

What feels different this year is the stronger emphasis on activation and collective experience. Many projects are not simply installations to look at, but situations that invite people to gather, listen, play, rest or participate together.

There is also a stronger ecological dimension running through the festival. We are not only talking about sustainability as a concept, but working directly with real urban processes: removing pavement to recover permeable ground, reusing infrastructures in disuse, creating climate shelters or working with discarded materials at an architectural scale.

2026 participants

W*: Who are some of the key participants for 2026?

JP-I: [As already noted] Smiljan Radić Clarke will present Circo, a temporary structure inspired by travelling circuses and fragile architectures of observation and gathering; [and] Matilde Cassani Studio is working with local textile traditions and rituals around the Arco de San Bernabé. AAU Anastas will present Cathedral for One, a stone structure conceived for a single visitor and activated through daily sound services with works by artists including Yara Asmar, Nicolas Jaar, Hania Rani and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi.

In the Urban Ecologies section, Sahra Hersi’s The Library Garden transforms a paved square next to the Rafael Azcona Library into a civic garden connected to depaving, seeds, care and climate adaptation. Parabase will reuse components from an electrical substation in Transtation, while noof group will develop a pilot project exploring shade, cooling and thermal comfort in public space.

We also have projects by raumlaborberlin, Boltshauser × Garbizu Collar, BEAR, Future Firm, DF DC, Gabriel Fontana and Amanda Pinatih, 2050+, TŁO and many others. The interesting thing is not only the names themselves, but the coexistence of very different ways of thinking about public space within the same urban framework.

This year's wildcard

W*: What’s the most unusual installation this year?

JP-I: Perhaps Circo by Smiljan Radić Clarke. What interests me is that it introduces uncertainty into the city. A circus is never entirely architecture, never entirely performance, never entirely public space. It belongs somewhere in between.

For one week, that ambiguity becomes part of the city. It creates a temporary condition, where fiction, gathering and urban life overlap.

AAU Anastas’ Cathedral for One would be another candidate, but for opposite reasons. While Circo is collective and extroverted, Cathedral for One is radically intimate. It is conceived for a single visitor and constructed entirely from recovered stone fragments. You enter alone into a stone structure activated through sound pieces by artists including Nicolas Jaar, Yara Asmar and Hania Rani. It feels suspended somewhere between architecture, ritual and listening space.

The Concéntrico legacy

W*: What are you hoping for visitors to take away from visiting the Concéntrico experience?

JP-I: I hope visitors leave with the feeling that cities are not fixed. Public space is often perceived as something already decided and already defined. Concéntrico tries to reopen that imagination.

The festival allows people to experience familiar places differently, even if only temporarily. A parking lot becomes a collective playground, a paved square becomes a garden, a courtyard becomes a listening chamber, a bridge becomes a social space. Once you experience that transformation physically, it becomes difficult to see the city as completely immutable again.

Many of the projects we develop are not only about spatial transformation, but about mediation. They create situations where people can recognise themselves differently, or recognise others differently. Through fiction, ritual, play, celebration or collective experience, architecture becomes a tool for imagining other forms of coexistence.

I think this is especially important today, because cities have become highly polarised environments where even very basic urban questions – mobility, climate, public space – are quickly absorbed into ideological conflict. In that context, architecture still has the capacity to produce shared experiences that escape fixed positions, even temporarily.

After 12 years, I increasingly see Concéntrico less as a series of installations and more as a cultural framework for reading the city differently. The projects are temporary, but what remains is often a shift in perception: the understanding that public space is mutable, and that the ways we inhabit it can also change.

Concéntrico 2026 runs 18-23 June 2026 in Logroño, Spain

concentrico.es

Seen after a summer storm, the Serpentine Pavilion 2026's tactile brick body looks fresh, orange and inviting. Some of Serpentine Galleries’ past commissions in London's Kensington Gardens may have sought to convey a sense of enclosure – either as discrete structures with traditional walls and windows, or objects that discussed shelter or a meditative space. This year, the design by Mexican studio Lanza Atelier looks open, fluid – and yet smartly delineated by simple forms: a bench, a wiggly wall, a light, translucent flat-roof structure. It is clear, legible, yet somehow deconstructed – and we can't wait to step inside.

Explore the Serpentine Pavilion 2026 by Lanza Atelier

When the fast-emerging practice, founded by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo (their past works include Mexican retreat Casa Jajalpa, featured in the December 2020 edition of Wallpaper*), was announced as the Serpentine Pavilion 2026 designer in January this year, its directors spoke of a curvilinear wall snaking across the site. Their pavilion was fittingly named a serpentine and nods to the crinkle-crankle wall, an outdoor, typically brick structure found lining site borders, often enclosing a garden. The duo talked at the time about creating moments that frame 'movement and pause', 'gentle geometries' and 'permeability'. The real thing, opening its doors this week, does not disappoint.

The Lanza pair explain that the pavilion's core idea was there from the very beginning, and once they started researching their project's setting, place and history and linking it up to their own fascinations about materiality (and specifically brick, which they have often used in their past works), it all made sense and came together cohesively quite organically. Arienzo recalls: 'Initially, we tried making a patio, and a lot of things, but the crinkle-crankle wall appeared and it was perfect because it's like a serpent.'

The structure sits slightly offset from the site's centre, its curvy wall gently echoing the orientation of the path that leads from the street to the Serpentine South Gallery's entrance. It subtly divides the north and south parts of the site – true to the historical positioning of the crinkle-crankle, the architects explain, which often looks south. 'We also wanted to have something in the perimeter,' Abascal explains. 'We didn't want it right at the centre, and we put a bench on the south side of it.'

This way, they stress, the pavilion embraces the entire plot. The aim is to encourage visitors also to use the lawn between the bench and the wall and make full use of the gallery's outdoor areas. One cannot help but think that their pavilion makes a beautiful floorplan drawing, and they seem rightly proud of it too.

The pavilion has a strict budget, so architects always need to get inventive with their designs. Being smart and frugal with restrictions, materials and finances came naturally to the team, too. 'It relates to our way of building in Mexico,' Abascal says. 'You have to be very clever in what elements you need in the structure. We always try to build less. And we also try [to get the] different elements to perform more and work hard. I mean, maybe a wall carries a roof, and also divides, but what else?'

Using brick - and a focus on beautifully crafted materiality - in clever and unexpected ways naturally resonated with the duo, and they worked with blocks neatly tied together through metal fastenings and rods that go through each element's holes. It's a universal material with a strong history in the UK's built environment (and the brick they used comes from the region), but it gave them a challenge, and in turn, they gave it a twist.

Arienzo says: 'The challenge was creating a disassemblable pavilion out of brick. A brick wall is typically solid; it's opaque, it's permanent. Usually, the brick's features are almost invisible, but here we are flipping them. So it's just brick, but with a twist, you know? Meanwhile, the roof is softer, lighter.' The floor is ceramic and follows the brick walls' colouring, producing a pleasingly unified effect. The pair also used their designs for the chairs within.

Adding to the delights of having a brand-new park folly to play with, Serpentine Galleries is also celebrating its pavilion project's 25th anniversary – a landmark moment and a bonus to the popular public piece of architecture that pops up in Kensington Gardens each year. And appropriately, since it all started with a Zaha Hadid-designed pavilion in 2000, this year's iteration includes a collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation. It takes the form of a dedicated programme of panel discussions and talks, set to take place inside the Lanza-designed construction throughout the summer.

Bringing together festivity and texture, the British garden and the idea of a folly, the Serpentine Pavilion 2026 will no doubt find itself comfortably at home in one of central London’s biggest green expanses – orange brick, curvy walls, and all. And don't forget, feel free to sit on the lawn.

Sponsored by Goldman Sachs, the Serpentine Pavilion 2026 by Lanza atelier will be on show at Serpentine South 6 June – 26 October 2026

In Accra, unfinished concrete structures punctuate the rapidly evolving cityscape. Here, architecture often exists in a state of suspended animation. Neither abandoned nor complete, but quietly inhabited. This sense of in-betweenness is precisely what Juergen Benson-Strohmayer of TAELON7 explores in his latest installation, the new Accra pavilion titled Limbo Engawa.

Commissioned by Ghanaian contemporary arts institution Limbo Museum in partnership with Art Omi, the project seeks to examine how skeletal structures can interact with the surrounding landscape. ‘Limbo Engawa highlights the potential of in-between or overlooked urban spaces not just as gaps in the city, but as sites for experimentation,’ states Limbo Museum and Limbo Accra founder, Dominique Petit-Frère.

Tour the new Accra pavilion, Limbo Engawa

The name draws inspiration from the Japanese architectural concept of engawa, the threshold that separates the interior from the exterior. Drawing on this idea, architect Benson-Strohmayer developed a sculptural framework that activates the forgotten edges of the Limbo Museum, transforming them into spaces for encounter, movement, and exchange.

At the centre of the installation sits an oversized woven daybed that shades, frames views, and invites occupation. Visitors can sit, recline, or simply relax as nearby farmers tend their plots. ‘Rather than producing a permanent monument, the project proposes a flexible architectural tool that can activate spaces that are otherwise overlooked,’ says Benson-Strohmayer.

The woven daybed takes inspiration from everyday scenes. Across construction sites worldwide, workers often rest on simple woven beds during long shifts. This design reimagines that familiar object at an architectural scale. ‘The museum’s unfinished architecture becomes a collaborator, guiding the dialogue between the interior carcass and the exterior landscape and allowing the public to engage freely within this space,’ says Petit-Frère.

Constructed from lightweight modular steel frames, the installation is wrapped in strips of salvaged billboard material, cut and woven by hand into a flexible skin. ‘The frames are modular and light enough to be carried by one person,’ explains Benson-Strohmayer. ‘These steel structures are fabricated using techniques similar to those used in roadside kiosks and billboard construction.’

‘Beyond the architecture itself, this collaboration is a way to explore how we can inhabit space, cultivate ideas, and nurture community at the same time,’ says Petit-Frère. For the founder of the Limbo Museum, the project aims to establish a new model for the annual commissioning of pavilions across Africa. ‘I have always wanted to create an annual architectural commission in Africa, similar to the Serpentine Pavilion.’

Later this year, Limbo Engawa will reappear at Art Omi in New York’s Hudson Valley, where its modular system will transform again. In contrast to Accra’s dense urban conditions, the American version will face the open landscape and changing seasons of the Hudson Valley. ‘The project unfolds across two very different landscapes, yet remains rooted in each place, creating a dialogue between Accra and New York that feels alive, open and deeply generative,’ notes Petit-Frère.

Around the world, unfinished buildings are often overlooked and rarely seen as sites for opportunity. Limbo Engawa, however, reimagines these spaces as sites of possibility, demonstrating how light-touch, thoughtful interventions can transform dormant structures into hubs of artistic, cultural, and social activity.

limbomuseum.org

taelon7.com

Fundación Casa Wabi's Mushroom Pavilion is not only the latest addition to the growing art-and-community-led campus in Mexico's Puerto Escondido, founded by artist Bosco Sodi – it is also, astonishingly, OMA's first completed project in the country. Led by the prolific and celebrated Dutch studio's New York office and partner-in-charge Shohei Shigematsu, the project has just been revealed and does what it says on the tin – its simple, ellipsoidal form has been optimised for the growing of mushrooms.

Explore Casa Wabi's Mushroom Pavilion by OMA

Inside the Mushroom Pavilion's clean volume lies a domed interior. This is divided into three areas – and respective parts of fungi growing: fruiting room, incubation room, and storage. These parts wrap around a central space that was conceived as a hub for gathering and acts as a mini auditorium for the Casa Wabi campus. An oculus at its very top brings light into the centre of the pavilion, illuminating its social activities.

Combining nourishment and community, this is a structure with multiple purposes and layered usage. There are handmade terracotta mushroom pots crafted by local artisans on the structure's stepped base and a concrete shell made of trowelled and poured-in-place concrete (the exterior is burlap-stamped so that it retains the site’s high-iron-content water for mushroom growing). This ensures fungi, people and natural elements come together in a single design, which effortlessly connects with all aspects of its concept.

'Working with Bosco Sodi and Fundacion Casa Wabi, we conceived a pavilion for the very specific function of mushroom cultivation while offering a space for people to come together. The result is an incubator of both food and community that’s spatially fit to support all types of activities for the locals, visitors, and the foundation. As a Japanese architect, it was especially meaningful to contribute an art campus guided by Japanese philosophy and spatial traditions,' says Shigematsu.

oma.com

casawabi.org

An image speaks a thousand words – and in this spirit, architecture makes the perfect vehicle to embody a position, make a statement or raise awareness. It is no surprise, therefore, that an ecological restoration and creative arts initiative, Aranyani in India, chose an architectural pavilion to illustrate its efforts and ambition, and 'deepen public connection to nature' in a bid to encourage more discussion – and action – around ecology. The result, the Aranyani Pavilion, is the inaugural structure of its kind, and it has just launched in New Delhi's Sunder Nursery gardens.

Explore the new Aranyani Pavilion in New Delhi 

Aranyani is an initiative founded in 2024 by conservation scientist and creative director Tara Lal, with a mandate to bring nature and humans closer together. Heritage and ancient wisdom are also key pillars for the organisation, which is named after the forest deity of the Rigveda (the sacred Vedic text that shaped early Indian ideas of nature). Bridging past and present, natural and human-made, Lal and her team decided to bring their ecological concerns to the built environment in the form of the Aranuani Pavilion – an annual commission.

'The idea emerged from time spent in sacred groves in Jaisalmer and Mawphlang, where I witnessed how conservation once lived inside ritual and community rather than policy. Those landscapes made me realise that restoration is not only a scientific act but a cultural and spatial one,' says Lal.

'When I founded Aranyani as an ecological restoration and creative arts initiative rooted in community, I always imagined that its work would eventually move beyond field sites and into shared public space. Architecture felt like a natural extension of that intention. It allows restoration science to become something you can physically enter. With the pavilion, Aranyani steps into the built environment for the first time, translating ecological research into a walk-through experience shaped by sacred geometry, material memory, and the dialogue between invasive and native species.'

The inaugural pavilion is titled Sacred Nature, and was conceived and speerheaded by Lal and designed in collaboration with emerging architecture studio T__M.space. Using sacred geometry and movement notions from the Indian culture, as well as drawing on the foundation's goals and the site's leafy setting, the new pavilion references the spatial logic of India’s sacred groves – rich, bio-diverse sanctuaries of local ecologies.

Lal elaborates on her choice of architects: 'For the first edition, I was looking for architects whose work could hold ecological thinking and material sensitivity together without becoming overly formal or detached from place. T__M.space’s practice merges digital craft with natural materials and sculptural form, and that felt aligned with the spirit of the pavilion.

'The collaboration grew from a conversation around sacred groves, spiral geometry, and the transformation of lantana into structure. The pavilion is conceived as an annual commission, and future editions will continue to be research-led, inviting architects who are willing to engage deeply with ecological context, local material intelligence, and the idea of architecture as a gathering space rather than a standalone object.'

The design was brought to life by makers The Works, led by Guillaume Lecacheux, and is complemented aurally by sound design from Gaurav Raina and Komorebi. Meanwhile, its physical manifestation is a spiral structure (think, a Fibonacci sequence floorplan), built using upcycled invasive Lantana camara, an invasive shrub brought to India by Portuguese and British colonial trade in the 18th century. Its latticed form is crafted by Ekarth Studio, and it is topped by a living, green canopy of some 40 native plant species.

The symbolic layering of the invasive Lantana beneath and the indigenous species above brings important conversations on India's colonial past to the foreground. 'The brief begins with ecology. Each pavilion must respond to a specific environmental question and be materially responsible in how it is realised. In this edition, that meant working with upcycled lantana camara, an invasive species introduced during colonial trade, and placing it in dialogue with a living canopy of native and naturalised plants,' says Lal.

'The structure had to be walkable, immersive, and able to host a public programme of talks, workshops, and performances so that it functions as a contemporary sacred grove. Continuity is also essential: the pavilion is not temporary in intention. After its presentation, it will be relocated to serve as a living classroom, and its plants redistributed into community-led environmental initiatives, ensuring that the project continues beyond its initial site.'

The structure has just opened its doors to the public and will remain on its site until 20 February 2026, brought to life not only by the visitors who will cross its threshold; a public programme of events and activations is also in the works, spanning performances, talks, workshops and guided tours that draw on both ecological and decolonial themes.

Lal says of her hopes for the venture: 'I hope visitors leave with a renewed sense of relationship to land. The spiral path slows the body, and the material contrast between invasive and native species makes visible the tensions within India’s landscapes today. At its centre, the shrine space recalls the monoliths of sacred groves, inviting pause and reflection. The pavilion is conceived to deepen public connection to nature and to open conversations around ecology, not as abstraction, but as something we move through and belong to. If it becomes a place where artists, scientists, architects, and neighbours gather and think differently about care and restoration, then it has done its work.'

The architects add: 'Our aim was to create a cohesive experience in which architectural geometry and materiality guide and immerse the visitor along a trajectory comparable to that of India’s sacred groves. We hope visitors take away the idea that architecture rooted in soft geometries and materials drawn directly from nature offers a powerful, and entirely achievable, alternative to conventional approaches.'

Following its closure at the Sunder Nursery, the Aranyani Pavilion is set to be transported and permanently installed at the Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls’ School in Jaisalmer, which was designed using local materials and sensibility by New York-based Diana Kellogg Architects in 2022.

'Sacred Nature,' Aranyani Pavilion, 4 - 20 February 2026, Sunder Nursery, New Delhi, India
t--m.space
aranyanilife.com

A compact, brutalist Chilean pavilion is peeking out from the trees in the South American country's richly forested Yungay region; discover Miel Pavilion, the newest project by prolific local architecture studio Pezo von Ellrichshausen. Set in the district of Santa Lucia Alto, the small, concrete structure cuts a powerful figure among snowy slopes and white-sprinkled foliage.

Tour this brutalist Chilean pavilion in the countryside

A self-initiated project, the small structure sits within the grounds of studio founders Sofía von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo's own property in the Yungay region – Luna House, which serves as both an expansive home and a workspace.

'The pavilion is a kind of self-commission, since it is located within the same farm in which Luna house sits – a 150-hectare property adjacent to the Cholguan river, which demarcates the Ñuble Region, at the foot of the Andes mountains, about 1,000m above sea level,' explains von Ellrichshausen.

She continues: 'The project is part of the Artificial Foundation, a non-profit initiative we have founded, which aims to protect the native forest while promoting the production (and contemplation) of art within such a natural environment. The whole purpose of this philanthropic project, including the land and its constructions, is [for it] to be left for public use.'

The architects, acting as custodians of the land and actively promoting the arts in their country, crafted the pavilion as a home for an organisation that could attend to both preoccupations and serve as a symbol of their intentions. It is also a form that mirrors the values of the nearby Luna House, bringing together making and exposed concrete; texture and geometric compositions; brutalism and minimalist architecture.

'The pavilion has a double purpose. It is a room that serves the processing of honey while also providing an open infrastructural function when the room is closed [and not in use]. The volume has a strong asymmetry, with an altarpiece-like façade facing the sunset and an amphitheatre facing the sunrise, towards ancient trees,' adds Pezo.

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The Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein has accumulated a lot of 'firsts' over the years. There is Khudi Bari, the first building by Marina Tabassum outside of her home country of Bangladesh; the Vitra Design Museum, Frank Gehry's first design outside of the USA; and, famously, Zaha Hadid's first design to be built ever, the Vitra Fire Station.

Now, there's a new feather in Vitra's cap; welcome to Doshi Retreat, the revered and ever-growing campus' contemplative installation by Indian 2018 Pritzker Prize-winning architect Balkrishna Doshi, designed in close collaboration with his granddaughter Khushnu Panthaki Hoof and her husband Sönke Hoof. The structure, nestled in a green field next to Tadao Ando's Conference Pavilion, is not only the first piece of architecture by Doshi outside of his native India but also the first he designed to be completed posthumously – as it is also the last the modernist architecture master worked on before his death, in 2023.

Stepping inside the Doshi Retreat

Doshi Retreat is an homage to the great architect's legacy, and was conceived by him as a place for serenity and spirituality – a sensory journey of sound and feeling. Its origin story begins with Vitra chairman emeritus Rolf Fehlbaum's visit to India a while back, Panthaki Hoof recalls. 'It all started with a friendship between them. Together they visited a temple [the Modhera Sun Temple], which had a small shrine as part of it.' It inspired Fehlbaum to approach Doshi much later for the design of a 'space for silence' in the campus – something that would reflect the serenity and feelings of calm he felt when inside that small shrine.

Doshi created a concept around a number of notions and words, trying to distil the project's meaning. He went to Panthaki Hoof with it, saying, 'Here, this is the retreat.' This birthed the design, which the three architects developed together. 'Our question to answer was, what do you want to feel in this place? What does the shrine mean?' she recalls. The project progressed during the pandemic, and Doshi's passing left the husband-and-wife team (who have since worked on more projects linked to Doshi's legacy, such as the new toilet block at the Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad) to complete it.

The design evolved in an organic way as the three architects collaborated on it – growing beyond the compact space that Fehlbaum might have originally envisioned. 'We were a bit nervous as Rolf was expecting a 2x2m shrine, and this was bigger. It was all driven by intuition,' says Panthaki Hoof. She explains: ‘This architecture was born from a dream Doshi had of two interweaving cobras. From this subconscious vision emerged a written narrative, followed by a sketched concept composed of notes and evocations. It then evolved into an invitation to embark on a journey of discovery.’

The piece – part architectural pavilion, part art installation – sits near the edge of the campus, off the main entrance and a stone's throw from Vitra's manufacturing facilities and museum. This was not where it was originally meant to be, but the architects, walking through the site as they were working on their design, stumbled upon a piece of land next to the Conference Pavilion that felt like the perfect fit. Fehlbaum feels that this way, the project's 'silence answers to Ando,' as all the buildings in the Vitra Campus 'need to speak with each other.'

The parcel of land included three mature trees and a sloped terrain, so the design was crafted to weave between these existing plants, digging a 'river delta-like' path towards the main pavilion space. This journey into the pavilion is as exciting as the arrival at its inner sanctum. As the visitor moves towards the main room, the walls retaining the site's earth and greenery get taller, the guest's gaze urged to turn upwards towards the sky. It affords a feeling of seemingly leaving the prior surroundings behind.

This experience serves as a smooth, gradual transition from the busy, working campus towards the retreat's meditative nature. Meanwhile, small rest stops on slightly higher ground are formed around the trees, offering opportunities to emerge, take a breath and look around.

The project's materiality is key. The pathways are flanked by weathered XCarb steel, the same cladding that wraps the main space too, which is matched in colour with the crushed bricks that line the approach. This reddish colouring creates a strong contrast with the leafy lawn, yet brings in a tactile feel. It also somehow accentuates the green element, bridging effortlessly nature and architecture – an element Vitra is keen to explore further. A masterplan for the wider campus is currently in development with Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets and involves the creation of mini forests across the entire site.

Inside the Doshi Retreat, a single, round chamber featuring a water pond and two simple, curved stone benches invites guests to sit and enjoy the gentle hum of a sequence of gong and ceramic flute that echoes in the room. This sound piece was faintly heard upon approach, too, but here it becomes more engulfing and subtly cocooning. A hand-hammered brass mandala crafted in India adorns the ceiling.

The project's main material, steel donated by ArcelorMittal, is set to age and change patina over time, adding to the pavilion's relationship with nature. As Hoof explains, it was produced using renewable resources to support a sustainable architecture approach. To that end, the foundations were not dug deep but were instead screwed in, so as to minimally disturb the existing land.

The Doshi Retreat was created as an invitation to solitude and a mindful pause – a space without a specific label. Its thoughtful nature and inauguration this week highlighted the Indian modernist's legacy – and his absence. What was it like, finishing the project without the great master, one of its three creators? Panthaki Hoof: ‘[Doshi] used to say that “silence is the most generous form of guidance”, and when he left, his absence was that silence for us.’

vitra.com

sangath.org

Canaletto's bridge; Poussin's clouds; Sir John Soane's 1815 building, which inspired his design for the now world-famous London red telephone box; and now, there's something for the younger visitor to the Dulwich Picture Gallery on offer, too. This weekend (6 September 2025) will see the public launch of the south London cultural institution's brand-new ArtPlay Pavilion and Sculpture Garden – a seminal project designed by architects Carmody Groarke, in collaboration with a host of artists and specialist creatives, which the gallery hopes will 'unlock art for everyone'.

Discover the ArtPlay Pavilion at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

The permanent pavilion designed by Carmody Groarke is a characterful, and yet rather subtle, minimalist timber structure that sits low and unobtrusive, placed next to the (also revamped, to include a canteen) Grade II-listed and formerly disused Gallery Cottage. The exterior references the gallery's architecture and colours (just as the canteen's timber cladding and colouring is a nod to the Dulwich Estate's modernist architecture on the other side of the site).

It may appear discreet, but big round openings and a series of canopies that make it look like a just-opened box about to reveal its present inside hint at its unexpected and enticing nature. Stepping inside, a riot of colour and playfulness unfolds.

Inspired by the gallery's famous paintings (the aforementioned bridge and clouds are part of the plan), a cruciform main interior has been designed by artistic duo Sarah Marsh and Stephanie Jefferies of HLD Collective as a rich, sensory play experience for children up to eight years old. Slides, swings, ball games and a wind tunnel are part of the immersive space, which is arranged around four themes (sunlight, water, wind, and earth) and will be available to book from 6 September – with dedicated days available free for local community groups.

Andy Groarke, co-founder at Carmody Groarke, says: 'The circular windows meet you straight on. The point was to make an intervention to create more engagement with the art. We also wanted it to extend out. The canopies reach out, something that the old building doesn't quite do.'

The architecture team also ensured the building is sensitive and sustainable, using locally sourced and milled Douglas fir from the UK for its wood architecture, as well as natural ventilation techniques (a central operable skylight brings in plenty of light and air) and a ground source heat pump.

If all this is not enough to tickle your fancy, an outdoor slide – an interactive, fully functional artpiece by Harold Offeh, titled Hail the New Prophet – is set to draw visitors of all ages, blending contemporary art and quirky fun.

'We wanted to bring a sense of playfulness and to open our art to everyone,' say Jennifer Scott, director of the gallery, which was founded back in 1811. 'That quirkiness is in our DNA – we are the world's first purpose-built public art gallery.'

The ArtPlay Pavilion comes with a new entrance to the gallery grounds to facilitate circulation for the families and other visitors, including school groups, set to book and use the new and old structures and the reworked (and free to access) wider grounds from this autumn. The grounds include a new Sculpture Garden featuring a wealth of new artworks, such as an undulating piece by landscape artist Kim Wilkie in the Lavington Sculpture Meadow, where an unloved hedge row and storage space used to be.

The new ArtPlay Pavilion and Sculpture Garden offer plenty of reasons to visit what is the biggest redevelopment at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in over 20 years. And now there's no excuse not to take the family with you.

dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

A colourful structure has appeared in Kensington Gardens; the Play Pavilion is a joint project by Lego Group and the Serpentine Pavilion, conceived and unveiled today to the public to celebrate World Play Day (11 June). The day marks the Lego Group’s take on the UN’s International Day of Play, 'which states that play is an essential right for every child’s growth and happiness'.

Explore the Play Pavilion in London

The structure, built in part using Lego bricks in bright orange and other primary hues, was designed by architect Sir Peter Cook of CRAB Lab and sits in the park next to Marina Tabassum's Serpentine Pavilion 2025, and will be open until 10 August.

Cook said: 'I’ve always believed architecture should surprise you, especially if you’re young. The Play Pavilion does just that, not in a grand way, but in the small detail and moments of discovery as you navigate the space. Inspired by young people, there is a space to hide, climb, perform or simply let your imagination run wild. It really is about unlocking infinite possibilities through play.'

The pavilion comes with its own, bespoke, free, summer programme of events, addressed to play enthusiasts of all ages. The scheme responds to the company's research, which shows that one in three children feel that existing spaces are not designed with their needs in mind when their creation is led by adults; meanwhile seven in ten (69 per cent) of parents express concern that their city 'does not offer safe and accessible play spaces'.

The Play Pavilion's inception aims to zoom in on these needs. 'If you don’t make play a priority, you lose more than joy – you also lose empathy,' said Lego's Kristofer Alan Crockett during the opening events. 'It’s a gift to the city and a pavilion for the community.'

The Play Pavilion is open until 10 August 2025, serpentinegalleries.org

This is a big year for the Serpentine Gallery – its Serpentine Pavilion 2025 marks 25 years since the original commission to Zaha Hadid, which saw the first in the series of temporary structures make an appearance in London's Kensington Gardens. The annual pavilion has since become a beloved staple of London summertime – always by a different author, an architect who has never built anything in the UK before, encouraging experimentation, creativity and architectural dialogue within the industry and far beyond.

So when this year's architect, Bangladeshi Marina Tabassum, conceived her pavilion in the last quarter of 2024, she fittingly chose to use her project as a prompt to discuss ideas of time, permanence and the role of architecture.

'I have always loved this notion of light and how atmosphere is created. There is a certain timelessness about working with geometry, atmosphere and formal expression,' Tabassum says. 'At the same time, our work is about the temporality of architecture. We are designing places for refugees or building houses for marginalised communities who are constantly being displaced.’ (Tabassum's Khudi Bari, a demountable, modular house prototype responding to Bangladesh's recurrent flooding disasters, a result of climate change, is an example.) ‘In this pavilion, these two different practices merge.'

A walk through the newly opened Serpentine Pavilion 2025

Her pavilion design, titled A Capsule in Time, reflects on such themes, and takes the physical shape of an (oversized) capsule too. The structure is built entirely of timber and features translucent, coloured glass that filters dappled light into the interior, allowing glimpses of the park's leafy setting beyond. It also moves, one of its central sections (there are four in total) set on wheels that allow it to join one of the arched ends to form a much larger, covered area. This will serve to host the myriad events the gallery has planned in its public programme throughout the summer, as well as to shelter any visitors when the London weather becomes a touch too unpredictable.

The project's easily legible, clean forms nod to a simplicity, scale and sense of geometry that the architect was keen to underline through her work. This minimalist take also allows the play of light and shadow within to take centre stage, mesmerising its guests to forget themselves and lose track of time.

Complementing this sentiment, a semi-mature ginkgo tree at the pavilion's heart will symbolise the passing of time as it grows and evolves through the commission's life (the pavilion will be taken down in October 2025), gently signalling notions of change. It also connects the structure to the park's tree-filled expanses, into which it will be transplanted after the pavilion's tenure here ends.

'The tree is also on the same axis as the bell tower of the Serpentine. It contextualises the whole building in its place,' Tabassum explains. 'The idea was also about bringing a very translucent light into the space so that it has this very serious, quiet, silent quality to it. People can come in and spend time, as long as they want. It just doesn't let you go. It keeps you, and you see the atmosphere change as the light changes throughout the day.'

Tabassum's work – all of which is located in her home country, with the exception of an installation of Khudi Bari at the Vitra campus, which was originally designed for Bangladesh too – embodies her philosophy of site-specific and sustainable architecture, and a purposeful design, which taps into its locale and is borne out of its contextual conditions. Was designing for a London environment different?

'I have never built here before, so there were a lot of unknowns, for sure, but I knew that this was a temporary structure,' she says. 'The wooden framing was for that reason, and it doesn't require too much of a foundation. I am always about sourcing whatever is near and readily available, and built locally. Foundations are reused. We worked very closely and collaboratively with AECOM and Stage One, who have been building these structures for quite some time now.'

The result feels solid, textured, grounded and contextual. At the same time, with the rise of the digital world and social media, the way architecture is experienced and news is consumed has no doubt changed in the years since the first Serpentine Pavilion commission. Does a pavilion still feel relevant today, as it did 25 years ago?

Tabassum thinks so: 'You could bring in your drawings and models [for an architecture exhibition], but architecture cannot be experienced through a model and a drawing, right? A pavilion makes sense, because then you are allowed to build not only your practice and your ethos, but also your creativity, and showcase it in a certain location. The Serpentine also benefits from it, because they also use this space in terms of all the free activities for the public and promoting art. It is an exhibition – but one that you can use.'

marinatabassumarchitects.com

serpentinegalleries.org

The 2025 Serpentine Pavilion will be designed by Marina Tabassum, it has just been revealed. The Bangladeshi architect and her Dhaka-based firm, Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), have worked on a proposal for a structure titled A Capsule in Time, reflecting on the themes of temporality, permanence and legacy in architecture. The annual Serpentine Gallery, built outside Serpentine South, is a staple (and highly coveted) commission in the London calendar, often seen as marking the kick-off of the summer season.

Tabassum has become known internationally for her crisp, textured and highly sustainably driven architecture. Her Khudi Bari design (a modular home prototype whose name means 'little house') was launched at the Vitra Campus in Europe last summer and is a great example of her work. It is a light, easily demountable and movable structure, designed as a response to Bangladesh's recurrent and frequent flooding disasters, a result of climate change. Her Serpentine Pavilion will be another rare example of her work outside her home country. We caught up with the architect at her Dhaka office to discuss her design.

Marina Tabassum on the 2025 Serpentine Pavilion

W*: Congratulations! Please tell us how the commission came about. When did you find out you won it?

Marina Tabassum: The commission is an invited competition to some extent, among architects who have never built in London before. I was invited to send a proposal in 2017. It didn't work out that time, but in 2023, the Serpentine came back asking if I'd still be interested. I got an email from Hans [Ulrich Obrist, the gallery's artistic director] sometime in early October that they chose my proposal to be built this year. It was very exciting. It also came at a time of political unrest and uprising in Bangladesh [refering to the country's student uprising in July 2024], leading to the fall of a government, so it was quite a difficult time for us. A lot of people lost their lives. It was a troubled time, and our design being selected was a breath of fresh air for us and something to look forward to in 2025.

W*: What does this commission signify for you?

MT: It's an interesting commission. It stays there for a very short time. It's a celebration of the London Summer. I've visited several of the Serpentine Pavilions before. Architects in the entire world always look at it, we always wonder who's doing the next one and what are they coming up with as their idea. It is short-lived and it is light-hearted, but at the same time, you can bring up all different kinds of agendas that concern our time. We can express ideas.

W*: What is at the core of your idea for this year?

MT: My interest was in the notion of time. The design reflects a sort of time capsule that will be there for five months. People will be using it in different ways; Serpentine events will happen, people will come from all over the world to visit it, and there are also the regular Kensington Garden users. And then, all of a sudden, by October, it's gone. And then we wait for the next one. So there is this temporality, but the design keeps on living in the virtual realm. At the same time, architecture has always been used as a tool to bridge generations and civilizations. It's been used as a celebration of power. It defies the whole notion of time. In a way, it is quite similar to the way our houses [in Bangladesh] are in the delta. The houses move, and they go away, but the story of where a house was, and how the family used to use it, becomes a sort of oral history, passed on from generation to generation.

W*: Tell us about your pavilion's afterlife.

MT: You have to think about the afterlife and its sustainability. You're using a lot of money, material, and effort. For me, my initial thought was that it could become a library somewhere, it could be in a school. It could be donated somewhere. Its form is open as it receives people in the park during the summer; but once it becomes a library, it will be much more closed and become one singular form.

W*: What is it made of?

MT: It's made out of wood. It is a wooden structure, and that's quite interesting and exciting as this is my first ever building in wood. We went for glulam wood as it is available and can be sourced in this part of the world and it means the structure can also move. The pavilion has two arched spaces and two half domes. In between, we have these polycarb panels to create a very translucent light inside. I always like working with light. My projects, especially the mosques, and other projects, play a lot with this element. So, in London's beautiful sunny days, the pavilion will become a bright, cheerful space. I also wanted to connect the design to Bangladesh. We have these fabric made structures called shamianas. These are like pavilions in form, and quite often used for larger gatherings, like weddings, other religious occasions or any other activities. They represent a coming together in the community.

W*: What do you hope the visitor might take away from the pavilion after a visit?

MT: This is a space where people come together, and you know what, in the first quarter of our century we have seen many wars, one after another. This is a space where diversity can be celebrated, and we can have talks and discussions. A platform where we can reconcile or talk about our differences and become one human being.

2025 Serpentine Pavilion: the basics

The Serpentine Pavilion has been commissioned annually by the Serpentine Gallery since 2000, with Zaha Hadid kicking off the series with the first temporary structure in central London's Kensington Gardens, right outside the landmark art space's original main home. The project is always awarded to an architect who has never built a permanent structure in the capital before and has, over the years, become a who-is-who of contemporary architecture. Recent participants have included Lina Ghotmeh, Minsuk Cho, Sumayya Vally, Frida Escobedo and Francis Kere.

The 2025 Serpentine Pavilion will launch to the public on the 6th of June and will remain on site until the 26 October 2025. The venue is free to visit and will become the base for the Serpentine Gallery's experimental, interdisciplinary programme for talks and other events, including education and community activities. This includes Park Nights, a platform for live encounters throughout the fields of music, dance, philosophy, technology and more.

The Pavillion is supported by Goldman Sachs, and is made possible through a collaboration with engineers Aecom and producers Stage One.

serpentinegalleries.org

marinatabassumarchitects.com

The Duho Pavilion peeks through the lush foliage as visitors walk through the Caribbean forest site on the Cayman Islands. The conceptual architectural pavilion, the brainchild of spatial design studio Limbo Accra in collaboration with landscape architect Malthe Mørck Clausen, features slender shapes and a deep integration with its environment. The design, Limbo Accra's first permanent public landscape architectural project, is equally akin to art; and it's the result of a commissioned by Open Palm, part of the Palm Heights residency programme, and curated by Keshav Anand.

Explore the Duho Pavilion by Limbo Accra

The Duho Pavilion is set in an expansive plot against an abandoned and derelict old hotel structure – in a way that follows Limbo Accra's typical fascinations, making the most of 'meanwhile' spaces and neglected buildings.

The studio's Dominique Petit-Frère says: 'Rather than engaging with the concrete shell of the building, as we normally would, we sought to understand the ecological entanglements of this site and how we can integrate this into an architectural gesture. Our goal was to design a nature-oriented spatial proposal, drawing inspiration from those who came before us.'

Petit-Frère continues to explain that this monumental landscape installation drew inspiration from the ceremonial meditation stools of the indigenous Taino people from the Caribbean.

'The installation not only honours Taino culture but also revitalizes the surrounding vegetation and environment, transforming it into a space of public engagement for the Palm Heights community and the residents of the Cayman Islands. The Pavilion will relocate to various sites throughout its lifespan, continuing to engage with the diverse typologies across the island.'

limboaccra.online

The Serpentine Pavilion 2024 is titled ‘Archipelagic Void’ – a name that perhaps at first glance does not instantly bring a park installation to mind. Yet, as its author, Korean architect Minsuk Cho, the principal of Seoul studio Mass Studies, explains, it's a particularly purposeful description. The term ‘archipelago‘ is used ‘to bring together an amalgamation of cultures, and from it, something completely unexpected comes out’, says Cho. ‘It's not hybridisation. It's a great model for our globalised era.’

Now completed in London's Kensington Gardens, the large-scale installation is about to open to the public (accessible from 7 June 2024). This is the 23rd pavilion in the Serpentine Galleries' much-loved series. As always, it will be accompanied by a curated season of events, such as a newly commissioned soundscape by composer Jang Young-Gyu; The Library of Unread Books, a piece by artist Heman Chong and archivist Renée Staal; and a series of performances and talks. It's all part of a carefully composed, rich programme of concepts and activities, with Cho's architectural pavilion design at its heart.

Serpentine Pavilion 2024: utopian and meditative

At the core of Cho’s concept sits the idea of ‘bridging’ or combining, putting things (physical elements, cultural ideas) together. ‘In Korea, and perhaps other Asian cultures, the idea of the pavilion is about a simple, often wooden structure, placed among amazing surroundings, and its role is to be a humble, private, meditative space. It is more about observing,' he explains. ‘In the West, the pavilion is often seen as a folly, something otherworldly and almost utopian.’ 

His (self-imposed) task, realised through the 2024 Serpentine Pavilion commission, was to mix these two ideas of what a pavilion can be and surround them with different functions, creating a menu of activities for the visitor, as well as the option to flexibly adapt the space to potential new uses. This thinking led to a structure consisting of five 'islands' – they form the project's ‘archipelago’ – a concept also manifested in the idea of bringing the two different interpretations of a pavilion into a single piece.  

'The word “archipelago” came from a book Hans [Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine Galleries’ artistic director] was making with Édouard Glissant [The Archipelago Conversations]. They coined the [use of] “archipelago” as a way to generate this cultural diversity,’ Cho recalls, talking about what inspired the pavilion's name.  

'I wasn’t thinking about it as [an archipelago] as I was initially designing it, but two days before submitting the proposal, I came across the book and thought, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing!' 

The Archipelagic Void’s five ‘islands’

An open-air area in the middle of the structure offers space for contemplation in the shape of a circular 'void' that nods to the madang, a small, flexible courtyard found in old Korean houses and used for anything from household chores to family celebrations and ceremonies. The broken-down volume of this year's pavilion was also informed by its surroundings and temporary nature, and was conceived to help it blend with its leafy, low-rise context. 

Each of the 'islands' is designed to have its own function and purpose. The 'Gallery' is a welcoming main entry, 'extending Serpentine South’s curatorial activities outside'. The 'Auditorium' becomes an informal, gathering area for events and impromptu meetings. The 'Library' is one of the smallest areas and offers 'a moment of pause'. The 'Tea House' references Serpentine South's historical role as a tea pavilion. And the 'Play Tower' is the home of a multifunctional, netted structure for kids (and adults) to play in.

Cho worked on his pavilion's floor plan vigorously. 'Looking at the previous pavilions, 22 before us, each brought a different way [for the public] to be in a generous space of different shapes. I am an architect and think in floor plans. In my practice, I have designed pavilions in the past, so we thought, what about we empty the place we use together the most, and we create an 8m void there instead?' he explains. 

'We looked at ways of bringing people together. It's about being generous and offering choices. So there are these different experiences around it and this empty space in the middle – the most flexible space, it can be whatever you want. Like a Korean madang.'

An additional bonus of the loosely star-shaped layout of the pavilion is that it creates a variety of outdoor areas in-between the irregularly shaped, built sections – more open-ended public space for visitors and users to make their own. 

The result is a structure placed on a concrete base that not only negotiates the site's slope with flair (supporting the pavilion's upper level, it becomes a bench, a perch or a table at different parts of the building's body); it also connects to the existing concrete foundations on site, ensuring it reuses what's there and no significant new groundwork was needed. 

The top is made of timber (Douglas fir, sourced locally) and recyclable PVC panels that add playful translucency and a punch of colour. Keeping things environmentally friendly was important to Cho and his practice. The material selection also makes the whole soft and tactile – another important quality for the team.

Adding to its sustainable architecture credentials, the structure can also be disassembled to travel in future. Its five sections' relatively simple, modular nature means they can be reconnected in a variety of ways. The architect adds: 'We calculated that taking down the elements that make the pavilion and reconnecting them in different configurations offers the possibility of creating, upon reassemblage, 180 new, different pavilions.'

There’s something poetic about his thinking – a bridging of cultures, a coming together – matched with efficiency and careful spatial planning that makes the most of the brief and maximises it. Combining invention and discovery, East and West, the 2024 Serpentine Pavilion is about to open. 

The Serpentine Pavilion 2024 will be open to the public 7 June – 27 October 2024

serpentinegalleries.org 

massstudies.com

With its ethereal volume and lightweight appearance, the Emerald Screen Pergola is an intriguing new feature at the Bogong Island Ecology Park in Wuxi, China. Designed by Chinese studio Wutopia Lab, the project, an architectural pavilion and sheltered corridor, is perhaps more of an abstract folly and a structured landscape, created especially for its green setting. Its aim? To inject 'magical realism' into the everyday.

Emerald Screen Pergola by Wutopia Lab

A feature like this has traditionally been 'an important architectural feature in classical Chinese gardens’, explain its architects. 'It is typically constructed from bamboo or wood, forming roofless corridors, pavilions, and walls. Climbing plants are then grown to eventually cover the walls and roofs.'

In this case, Wutopia Lab brings together modern materials (the structure is created out of steel mesh and tube) with contemporary, abstract, nature-inspired forms, which reference the historical function and typical setting of this typology. The temporary installations of its kind act as sunshades but also flower trellises. 

Bogong Island's original, 1.2km-long steel trellis used to be covered with wisteria and roses but fell into disrepair. Wutopia Lab stepped in to repair and reinvent the tired structure, giving it its new shape and white, mist-like appearance.

'These structures open, close, stand alone, overlap, and even disappear, redefining the previously monotonous design of the trellis corridor. The rich and vibrant interplay of light evokes the image of a Dragon Dance, hence the name “A wandering dragon-like Emerald Screen Pergola”,' the architects write. 

'I decided to design a flower pavilion to serve as both the entrance to the corridor and the park. Similarly, I used the white feather-like steel meshes by stacking them layer by layer to create a central, roofless structure. This would be my semi-transparent pantheon. Its completion will also mark the grand reopening of Bogong Island Ecology Park,' writes Wutopia Lab's chief architect Yu Ting. 

wutopialab.com

Orchid Pavilion – a new piece of timber architecture dedicated to the conservation of the eponymous flower in the Oaxaca region of Mexico – is set against a fittingly idyllic backdrop of blue skies and lush foliage. The structure, which has just been inaugurated at Puerto Escondido's Casa Wabi Foundation, was designed by Mexico City's Bernardo Quinzaños and his team at CCA Centro de Colaboración Arquitectónica. 

Orchid Pavilion: a thoughtful timber pavilion for flower conservation

The Orchid Pavilion is an exciting addition to the non-profit art and community organisation campus' rich and growing collection of architecture pavilions and buildings – from Tadao Ando's first commissions for the foundation’s founder, artist Bosco Sodi, to later additions such as Kengo Kuma's chicken coop.

'As we approached the design of the Orchid Pavilion at Casa Wabi, our research pointed toward some clear technical features, components, and facts. It became evident that in order to grow, reproduce, and collect orchids, we needed to create the right environment for them to thrive: humid, partially shaded, and well-ventilated,' the architects write. 

Responding to these needs, the studio crafted a structure that is light and permeable, yet provides shade and protection for the delicate flowers. 

The Japanese philosophy of Wabi-Sabi, a belief that 'beauty and harmony are found in simplicity, imperfection, and unconventionality', influences the entire foundation's approach, and this, as well as the Japanese concept of Ikigai (生き甲斐, ‘a reason for being'), was also a key driver here.

Quinzaños and his team worked with local artisans and craftspeople to create a sustainable pavilion that would reflect these values not only through its physical presence – its respect towards the environment, its lightness and handmade, timber nature – but also by providing a purpose-built home for both plants and people working to preserve them. 

'When you enter the pavilion, you breathe in the humidity, hear the gentle drops falling, feel the crossing winds, and hopefully, you will be able to remember who you are, what your reason for being is. What is your Ikigai,' the architects write. 

cca.mx

This new Art Jameel pavilion, Tarabot: Weaving a Living Forum, commissioned by the arts organisation and designed by Lebanese practice theOtherDada, is a fractal, domed structure stretching over the amphitheatre at the Jaddaf Waterfront Sculpture Park in Dubai. Weaving together traditional and high technologies, recycled waste materials and indigenous plants, the architectural pavilion aims to bring life to the area over the next five months, forming a new ‘interspecies habitat’. 

It sees Art Jameel, which supports artists and creative communities and is behind both the sculpture park and the wider Jameel Arts Centre, promote a conversation about sustainability and re-use. 

Founded in 2010 by architect Adib Dada, theOtherDada pushes the boundaries of traditional architecture, adopting a ‘holistic and biomimetic design approach with nature and people at its core’. Reflects Dada, ‘I had these two diametrically opposed practices – building for humans and building for other organisms […] When this commission came along, it became an opportunity to weave these two practices together in a meaningful way.’ 

Art Jameel pavilion, a study in sustainablity

Deeply involved in contemporary art scenes and climate activism in Beirut, from leading ‘Toxic Tours’ of the Beirut river to developing tree-planting project theOtherForest, Dada was invited to an Art Jameel symposium in March 2023 to discuss the role of arts institutions in addressing the climate crisis. 

Art Jameel director Antonia Carver explains, ‘What does it mean to create exhibitions in this climate? What do we do with all the materials after?’ As a direct result of the symposium, Art Jameel has been rethinking its exhibition production processes and reusing waste such as gypsum moulds.

‘Tarabot is an Arabic word that means “weaving together” [...] we’re weaving together issues of architecture, urbanism, ecology, wildlife and human-life centred design,’ says Dada. A lack of shade and life on the pavilion’s site prompted a shade-providing design. Working closely with architect Dalia Hamati, Nader Akoum, scientists, and desert conservationists, Dada conceptualised four life-giving ‘pillars’ – Soil, Water, Plants and Energy – for the pavilion, corresponding to the dome’s three touchpoints with the ground, and its roof.

The first pillar, Soil, makes compost out of waste from the art centre’s exhibitions, neighbouring restaurant Teible and coffee shop. Encased in modular ‘bouquets’ made from local date palm waste, a zero-carbon material, by Desert Board, the waste is broken down by mycelium (the root-like system of fungus). 

The Water pillar uses solar power to condense and filter water from the humidity in air. This water drips through a series of traditional passive cooling clay cones, handmade by local potters, collecting as freshwater in the pavilion pool. 

The Plants pillar uses the composted soil and collected fresh water to grow vegetables that return to the restaurant. Salicornia, an indigenous edible plant able to grow in saltwater, is also planted, further attracting insects, birds and pollinators. Artwork from multidisciplinary Dubai-based artist Solimar Miller features intricate handcrafted prints on upcycled fabrics, representing indigenous flora and fauna that are endangered in the UAE. 

The Energy pillar, on the roof features aluminium cones that funnel sunlight into the pavilion, and Arish, traditional palm-leaf roofing systems provide shade. 

Almost all materials used in the pavilion are biodegradable or fully recyclable. Once it’s dismantled, the modular cones of soil and plants will be divided and taken to garden homes and balconies by local communities, disseminating indigenous plants in the region. The unfinished steel structure’s fractal design was fine-tuned with local coral practitioners in the Emirate of Fujairah, and the structure will take on new life as an underwater habitat for coral, ‘linking life on land to life underwater’. 

On what he hopes visitors will take away from the project, Dada muses, ‘I think developing a culture of care and understanding on the more than human. It’s not about us saving the planet. The planet doesn’t need saving, we need saving.’

Tarabot: Weaving a Living Forum is open to the public at Jadaf Waterfront Sculpture Park, Dubai until 30 April 2024

Artjameel.org 

theOtherDada.com

theotherdada.com 

jameelartscentre.org

MPavilion 10, designed by Tadao Ando, opens today in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens. Since 2014, Naomi Milgrom Foundation has commissioned structures by an inspired selection of local and international architects including Studio Mumbai, Amanda Levete, Glenn Murcutt, Rem Koolhaas & David Gianotten, and all(zone), each creating a unique response to the site and the brief to create a new meeting place for Melbourne.

MPavilion 10 by Tadao Ando

Ando’s temporary structure is the architect’s first building in Australia, and the first MPavilion to focus on enclosure as an architectural gesture. Two offset squares create entrances in opposite corners that reveal themselves when you approach, and lead into a courtyard and reflecting pool in the centre of the pavilion. 

Inside, views to the city and park are framed through 16.8m long horizontal slits that run the length of the north and south walls. Ando’s signature concrete walls are complemented by paving in local bluestone – which extends into the reflecting pool – and creates an experience reminiscent of a walled Japanese garden.

Floating above the internal courtyard is a 14.4m aluminum-clad disc resting on a central concrete column, completing Ando’s masterclass in zen minimalist architecture that delivers a rare moment of calm in Melbourne’s city centre. In a nod to MPavilion’s history, Ando worked with Sean Godsell – the designer of the very first MPavilion – as the executive architect on this project.

Over the next five months, MPavilion will host over 150 free public events inspired by Ando’s architecture. 'I am honoured to have completed my first project in Australia, and to have created a piece of living architecture that will have such an important role in the cultural life of Melbourne this summer,' said Ando. 

'I hope that as people visit, they allow this space to enter their hearts, and allow their senses to tune into the light and breeze interacting with them and this space. I hope for them an experience of harmony with nature, with themselves, and with others.'

mpavilion.org 

tadao-ando.com 

The People's Pavilion 2023, the creative youth-centred competition organised by the award-winning community interest company Beyond The Box, has just been completed. ‘We should collectively be championing young people’s creativity,’ says Neil Onions, founding director of Beyond The Box. This pioneering initiative, now in its second iteration, sees teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18 design and build a temporary structure in east London.

The People’s Pavilion 2023

Located in Lea Bridge Library's garden in Waltham Forest, this year's pavilion was designed by 18-year-olds Bruno De Marco, Tomi Balogun, and Zhané Philips. The trio’s winning proposal was chosen over six other designs after receiving more than 2,500 public votes. Named ‘Roots of Heritage’ the scheme uses locally sourced timber to create an open space for reflection. The three students from the borough of Tower Hamlets also won an all-expenses trip to the Venice Biennale 2023, where they received a special tour of the British Pavilion. 

Constructed by Beyond The Box, the winning team, and an impressive set of volunteers, the scheme was made viable by engineering practice Price and Myers and David Chipperfield Architects. ‘The People's Pavilion is about the power of the collective,' says Onions. 

Young people not only design and build the pavilion but also curate what happens inside of it. As part of the programme, Beyond The Box employed a team of young people to produce a free summer festival at the temporary building. 

‘This year's People's Pavilion has been a perfect example of a space where culture and community have connected,’ says project lead Shirin Naveed. This cultural event line-up includes free film screenings, panel talks, and skills workshops organised by emerging practices Our Space, Bold, and 1:100 podcast and youth music company Gain Ctrl.  

The wider initiative, which saw young people learn about the built environment, was delivered in partnership with London-based organisations Re-Fabricate, Saqqra, and Scale Rule. Various architecture practices also supported the programme, such as Heatherwick Studios, Morris + Company, and AHMM. ‘The project is the product of many hands,’ says Marwa El Mubark, co-founder of Saqqra.  

The People’s Pavilion has helped upskill over 100 young east Londoners through creative workshops, training sessions and events. 'We provide opportunities for all the runners-up and we encourage the young people to stay on our network post the programme,’ says Onions. Through this forward-thinking initiative, Beyond The Box aims to discover the young place-makers of tomorrow, flipping the script on who gets to design and curate cultural spaces. 

beyondtheboxcic.com 

As the Serpentine Pavilion 2023 completes and prepares to open its doors to the public later this week, there's hope that this spring's few, timid days of sunshine in London will make for a slow-burn, warmer summer. And once temperatures rise - and even if not - the latest iteration of the Serpentine Galleries' Kensington Garden annual summer special will be there to provide not only shelter (from the hot sun - or drizzle), but also a place to sit, socialise, relax and appreciate public architecture. 

And this is exactly what the French-Lebanese architect behind it, Paris-based Lina Ghotmeh, was hoping for, when she first conceived of her design. Titled 'À table,' the Serpentine Pavilion this year is envisioned as an open and democratic invitation for everyone to come together and enjoy nature, architecture, serenity, and each other's company. 

The Serpentine Pavilion 2023 is unveiled

Ghotmeh's design seems easy to read - a round arrangement of seating, set in a circular pattern, topped by a pleated, softly conical roof held up by timber posts. The 'circle' on floorplan can be divided into nine equal sections, and from those sections, the building's patterns arise - from the exposed beams on the ceiling, to the timber floor arrangement and its two rows of columns which dot the periphery - gently merging form and function. Its wooden structure was put together in collaboration with engineers Aecom and construction studio Stage One - and the entire pavilion was built predominantly from bio-sourced and low-carbon materials, its creators explain. This resonates with Ghotmeh's overall ethos, which favours sustainable architecture. There are perforated screens in the shape of leaf cut-outs, and bespoke furniture where visitors can sit. And of course, as always, this is all free, and soon to be open to the public to enjoy. 

This openness and public availability were key drivers when it came to the design development. 'When I got the commission, I was thinking that this pavilion [series] is always expressing the zeitgeist. How can mine do that? I thought about the importance of places of assembly. Also something that brings us closer together. A table unites this and memories from my childhood, moments where we are all routed to earth,' Gohtmeh said at the launch celebrations. 'I wanted to make a place of assembly. Also it's this moment to feel calm under a roof, something where we are protected and feel serenity. But I also hope to see a lot of children running around here.'

The Serpentine Pavilion 2023 architect: Lina Ghotmeh

As is traditionally the case, this is Ghotmeh's  first realised commission on London soil. The architect, who heads a medium sized practice in Paris, has worked on a number of built and unbuilt schemes so far - including the Maroquinerie de Louviers by Hermès in France, and the Stone Garden apartment block in Beirut - and has many more in the pipeline. When she got a call from Serpentine last year, she was surprised to find out it was about the pavilion. She was invited to make a proposal, which she did, and got the commission. 

Her approach appears confident and balances this with sensitivity, as context and material always play a key role in the architect's designs. With the Serpentine Pavilion 2023, this was also the case, as she took her cues from the existing surrounding structures, trees and planting in order to carve her volumes. The result, is a semi-open, light installation that feels subtle in its natural setting. 'It is a structure that’s meant to be really lightweight and can be transferred in the future,' Ghotmeh explains, highlighting the pavilion's ability to have an afterlife. 

The Serpentine Pavilion 2023 hopes to fly the flag for a sense of coming together, as well as a slowing down and contemplating, nurturing a feeling of community and nature. 

It opens to the public on the 9 June and will remain there, hosting a variety of events on a rolling programme, until 29 October 2023. 

linaghotmeh.com 

serpentinegalleries.org 

The building that put Arthur Mamou-Mani on the map lasted just more than a week, before going up in flames. This would have been the kiss of death for any other architect. But for Mamou-Mani, it was a career-making moment: the building in question, called Galaxia, was the temple for the 2018 Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada; and its fiery demise was not only intentional, but part of a long-held tradition. Despite its brief lifespan, Galaxia left a deep impression in the hearts of many, and propelled its creator to the forefront of digitally designed and fabricated architecture. 

It was late 2017 when the London-based French architect was announced as the winner of the competition to create the following year’s Burning Man Temple – a non-denominational space at the heart of the annual countercultural arts event, destined to be burned at its close. He envisioned a spiralling tower evoking ‘stars, planets, black holes, the movement uniting us in the swirling galaxies of dreams’. It was formed of pre-cut timber, assembled on-site as triangles, and folded into 20 modules like a giant piece of origami. At its periphery, small alcoves allowed moments of quiet reflection. Its central space held a chandelier of 3D-printed giant teardrops, a reflection of the technologies on which Mamou-Mani established his practice. 

Arthur Mamou-Mani and the Burning Man Temple

The plans were agreed and anticipation was rife. Then came the challenge of fundraising. Burning Man is based on ten principles set out by its co-founder Larry Harvey, one of which being radical self-reliance: encouraging participants to ‘discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources’. This meant figuring out how to survive and build a community in the desert, but also, in Mamou-Mani’s case, finding the construction budget to top up the modest $100k offered by the Burning Man organisation.

Mamou-Mani and his collaborators took to the crowdfunding platform Hatchfund, selling T-shirts, jewellery, and 3D-printed models of the temple design. They also threw a fundraising party. But by early May 2018, with less than four months to go before Galaxia was due to be unveiled, the architect calculated that he was $168k short.

Knowing that the Silicon Valley elite had a fondness for Burning Man, Mamou-Mani cold-emailed a number of tech titans – Zuckerberg and Musk among them – to see if they could help. He remembers trying different permutations of their email addresses in the hope that one of them would come through.

Fortunately, Google co-founder Sergy Brin replied just an hour later, agreeing to put up the necessary funds as an homage to the recently deceased Harvey. Not only that, Brin would later offer another donation when the project went slightly over budget, as well as visit the construction site to lend a hand with the building. A separate conversation ensued when Brin emailed the architect with a Pinterest board and asked for advice on building a playground for his children.

This was one of many pivotal connections enkindled by Galaxia. Another admirer of the temple was Mikolaj Sekutowicz, a partner at Therme Group, an Austria-based company that designs, builds and operates the world’s largest wellbeing resorts – offering thermal bathing, therapies and health and fitness activities, often in an architectural setting. Mamou-Mani soon came on board as one of Therme Group’s collaborators, and in summer 2021, the group formed a joint venture with the architect to run Fab.Pub, a provider of additive construction and fabrication technology that is currently housed in the back of his London studio. 

Galaxia further caught the attention of Karin Gustafsson, design director of fashion label COS, who commissioned Mamou-Mani to build a pavilion from 3D-printed geometric modules for Milan Design Week 2019, called Conifera; as well as Ismail Tazi, co-founder of homeware brand Trame Paris, who recently worked with the architect on a ceramics collection (more on that later). And the chandelier in the oculus would come to inform Mellifera, an installation that graced the atrium of London luxury grocer Fortnum & Mason in 2021.

While business has clearly flourished, Mamou-Mani’s studio retains the dynamism of a start-up. Set in a cluster of containers in the neighbourhood of Cambridge Heath, it has desks and 3D-printers of varying sizes side by side to allow rapid prototyping, and a young team is hard at work, finessing parametrically designed forms and using Silkworm (an open-source plugin that Mamou-Mani co-wrote, which converts CAD forms into printing directions) to turn them into reality. Naturally, there are 3D-printed models on every surface, experiments in form and material composition for both commissions and self-initiated projects. The meeting area table in front is a piece of glass supported on four Conifera modules, and when on my visit in June 2022, it is surrounded by prototypes for the 3D-printed stools soon to be launched by Fab.Pub. They are sturdier than appearances might suggest.

Outside are more Conifera modules, deliberately exposed to wind and rain to prove the longevity of PLA, the renewable polymer (made from fermented plant starch) which Mamou-Mani favours for his 3D printing projects. An advocate for sustainable architecture, he mentions that for a 2021 project at London’s Design Museum, he had partnered with French software maker Dassault Systèmes on a life cycle assessment. It showed PLA to have a significantly smaller environmental footprint than ABS, the petroleum-derived plastic widely used for 3D printing; for one, the production of PLA creates 80 per cent less carbon. But the architecture and design industries have been slow to embrace PLA because of doubts over its durability. 

‘To recycle PLA, you have to crush it into small pieces and then put it into an industrial composter, which is 60 degrees Celsius with 100 per cent humidity, so enzymes can break down the material. Until you do that, PLA is not going to biodegrade.

‘Separately, there are people who buy PLA objects thinking they’re biodegradable, so when they’re done with it, they just bury it in the garden, or throw it in the waste thinking that it will decompose. That’s also inaccurate. And it’s a shame that such a revolutionary material is so misunderstood.’

Printing in PLA is just one way in which Mamou-Mani is setting the record straight on the material, and stretching its potential. At the moment, the studio uses sugarcane-derived PLA, which he considers suboptimal as the manufacturer grows the plant in Thailand. To eliminate the need for cross-continental shipping, he’s looking into creating PLA from local potatoes and beetroot. He’s also working on educating the end-user: buyers of his 3D-printed stools will be asked to return them to Fab.Pub when they’re no longer needed, so they can be put into the studio’s crusher, industrially composted, and their constituent PLA reused in a new product.

This promise of truly local, waste-free production is what initially drew Therme Group to form its joint venture with Mamou-Mani: it wanted furniture and façades for its wellbeing resorts. Mamou-Mani would send them as pieces of code, which could be received and 3D-printed on-site. This way of working lends itself to endless experimentation: if any element doesn’t work, the architect can tweak the code, resend, and right away an improved version can be printed locally and put in place. 

The joint venture will also allow Mamou-Mani to create Fab.Pub locations all over the world, where its 3D printers and recycling facilities can be accessed by the general public. It will ‘enable communities to 3D print their own projects locally, democratising the possibilities of the production process,’ explains Stelian Iacob, senior vice president and COO of Therme Group.

The first of these international Fab.Pubs will be hosted in Speranƫă, a new building in Bucharest that Mamou-Mani has designed for Therme Group, located close to its existing wellbeing resort. The building will comprise two swirling parametric timber structures, called Hope and Time – bearing a resemblance to Galaxia, and accommodating the Fab.Pub as well as spaces for reflection, independent shops, and a restaurant. They stretch out to encompass an open-air amphitheatre, as well as planting to provide natural shade and a biophilic environment for visitors. Over time, the plants will grow to become part of the building itself.

‘Therme wanted two structures that would complement each other, and we came up with two interconnected hexagons that twist. They’re tileable, so we can continue to add structures and different shapes and sizes to create a whole galaxy,’ says the architect, who revealed renderings of Speranƫă for the first time in the August 2022 issue of Wallpaper*. He speaks highly of Therme’s approach to wellness and likens their facilities to Roman thermal baths: ‘they’re almost like temples – there’s a purifying, cathartic element.’

Iacob adds that the design brief for Speranƫă ‘focused on enabling a more personalised experience with the built environment, allowing people to create a relationship with the space rather than imposing it on them. The design creates opportunities for meditation and relaxation, as well as social interaction.’

There are more ambitious architectural projects in the pipeline, both for Therme and other clients. In Bali, Mamou-Mani has designed a lighthouse as part of a new eco village called The Nyanyi Project. The client called to say they had just bought an abandoned colonial bridge made out of ironwood, and wanted to reuse the material. Mamou-Mani reasoned that the material was strong enough to form the structure of a lighthouse, and decided to complement this with a twisting bamboo skin. ‘They were keen to link the structure to natural geometries, so we decided that the twist should follow the golden ratio,’ he says. The tower will be named Bhuma – ‘Earth’ in Sanskrit, and is meant to stand as a beacon of hope.  

Looking at Mamou-Mani’s buildings, we can discern a sense of spirituality, and an affinity for nature. I point out that these qualities are not often associated with digitally designed architecture. ‘I think the spirituality comes from the fact that sacred spaces often use natural geometries, and there’s a sort of universality to them,’ he replies. The son of a computer scientist and an environmentalist, Mamou-Mani also points out that computer-generated forms can often bear a closer resemblance to nature than forms drawn by an architect’s hand: ‘computers work from rules and parameters, so whatever you develop will follow a similar process to how a flower grows, following a genetic code.

‘It’s interesting to think of every form not in isolation, but as part of a system. When you start thinking this way, you’re no longer trying to dictate the overall form, but letting things emerge from the parameters you can think of: for instance the materials you use, the structural and environmental constraints. It’s a very humble way to approach architecture.’

The intention to create systems rather than isolated structures certainly explains Mamou-Mani’s eagerness to work across multiple scales, within and beyond Fab.Pub. The collaboration with Trame Paris has resulted in a collection called Muqur, previewed in February 2022 at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and inspired by the honeycomb-like ornamental vaulting (‘muqarnas’) that lines the domes of the Alhambra fortress in Granada. The pieces are 3D-printed on-demand at Fab.Pub and then hand-glazed. Tazi, the brand’s co-founder, points out that given a sufficiently large order (say, ten or 15 pieces of the large vase), they can find a 3D printing studio in the customer’s home country and produce the pieces there. He explains, ‘It makes much more sense, especially when you consider logistical hurdles and costs of international shipping. The design industry needs to find and adapt to on-demand local models – additive manufacturing and 3D printing could be the answer.’ 

Mamou-Mani recently created three interventions for the Paris HQ of French telecoms company Orange. They include a 150m-long parametric installation emerging from the entrance walls, formed from 4,000 laser-cut zintec sheets; cocoons in steam-bent timber for its workspaces; and a wave-shaped installation for the boardroom ceiling, comprising flat-packed plywood sheets that have been cut with hundreds of lattice hinge to create parametric curves. By introducing these biophilic forms, he hopes to bring a touch of nature into an otherwise corporate space.

The architect is now working on a deeply personal project – his own home, in London’s Stoke Newington, which will consist only of environmentally friendly materials: the walls and ceilings will be made out of clay, and all the furniture will be 3D-printed from PLA at Fab.Pub (which is taking some time, considering how busy it is with commissioned work). ‘It’s been a challenge, but [my wife] Sandy and I are used to making things ourselves rather than buying them. I had 3D-printed her wedding ring after all, and we got married at Burning Man, at the temple I built.’

Speaking of Burning Man, the 2022 festival included a new Mamou-Mani structure, called Catharsis. It wasn’t the Temple, but rather an amphitheatre made from 60 timber modules that followed a fractal pattern. ‘Sometimes in mathematics, you have concepts that are just purely described as mathematical facts: a circle made up of circles, an infinite edge, curvature being smaller than straight lines, and so on. What is interesting is to see their architectural interpretation,’ explains the architect. 

The structure comprised seven gateways reaching towards the sky, becoming increasingly intricate and seemingly extending into infinity, forming a set of galleries and performance spaces. Artistic interventions around Catharsis included Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations, a mixed-reality installation that responded to viewers’ neurological brainwaves and invited them to contemplate the meaning of interpersonal wellbeing. Meanwhile, daily happenings included talks, musical performances, a poetry reading, a fire performance, and even a wedding ceremony.

Beyond its solid financial backing (Therme Group paid for the structure, so there was no last-minute fundraising panic), Catharsis differed from Galaxia in that it wasn’t burned down at the conclusion of the festival. It was designed to be easily dismantled and then reassembled on another site – hopefully London’s Somerset House, Mamou-Mani says – and possibly go on a world tour. ‘One of the other principles of Burning Man is radical inclusion. And what could be more inclusive than bringing your structure to people who otherwise can’t visit?’

 mamou-mani.com

fab.pub

Wonderfruit 2022 recently wrapped up – and in the eight years since Pete Phornprapha launched the festival's first edition, back in 2014, the event has become a bona fide fixture on an already overcrowded Australasian festival circuit. Certainly, Wonderfruit has always had serious musical chops, luring a global Rolodex of bold-faced musicians to play in imaginatively constructed venues – the latter spread across 140 acres of land owned by Phornprapha’s family on the grounds of Pattaya’s Siam Country Club, a brisk two-hour drive south of Bangkok. But just as crucially, over the years, Wonderfruit’s MO has been finely tuned to a larger purpose: to explore what Phornprapha describes as the intersection between art and culture, music and nature. The better, goes the thinking, ‘to encourage, develop and innovate meaningful relationships with ourselves and nature’.

Wonderfruit 2022

For most of the 25,000 festival goers at the 2022 edition of the festival – back on the calendar after a two-year Covid-driven hiatus – the physical form of the event was the honey trap: once people were on the grounds, the eclectic programming would do the rest. For what really sets Wonderfruit 2022 apart from other cultural, dance and musical festivals such as Glastonbury and Burning Man is its canny mix of attractions. There’s something for everyone here – body language workshops, DYI dyeing and yoga, alongside live DJ sets, organic dining, and shamanic breathwork.

Phornprapha and his crack squad of architects, designers, chefs, musicians, artists, wellness practitioners and life coaches put together an event where architecture fiends were thrilled by the venues concocted by festival master-planner Ab Rogers. Together with a coterie of mainly Thai designers, the Lisbon-based architect created dozens of wonderful follies from sustainable, recycled materials – the collective forming a veritable micro-city. 

Artist Nanu Youttananukorn, for instance, updated a previous installation called Embrace – a cocoon of rammed earth wrapped around a fallen tree – with new columns cast from animal feed bags, and a soundtrack of Thai tribal music recorded by music curators Hear and Found; whilst Boonserm Premthada, fresh from his summer showing at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, fashioned Open Kitchen, a vast two-storey manse with no walls, made from timber rescued from an old tobacco factory. Rogers himself updated a slew of pavilions, including Bath House, a circular floating bamboo platform on which visitors sunned themselves at high noon, and the in-the-round Theatre of Feasts, a Mad Max-like dining hall made of bamboo, its raftered ceiling cut through like Rome’s Pantheon with a giant oculus. ‘Music is round,’ Rogers explained. ‘That’s why my structures here are round.’

Meanwhile, tall and loose-limbed, Phornprapha roamed the festival grounds on foot and on an electric bike, his gregarious, infectious energy feeding every conversation, whether his collaboration with rewilding experts SUGi to plant 20,000 trees to create Ancestral Forest, an actual, self-sustaining forest on a four-acre corner; how it’s important to build well with less; or how he’s trying to turn Wonderfruit into a 360-degree brand. ‘It’s important to have an ideology.’ On every metric, it’s an approach embraced with enthusiasm by all the designers, especially as the creative remit is so broad and upfront. As Premthada points out, ‘Pete is straightforward and genuinely interested in sustainability. It’s not just talk.’

‘Wonderfruit is a playground,’ Youttananukorn adds. ‘You get to try new ideas without any commercial pressure.’ For Nick Luscombe – founder of Tokyo-based sound artists MSCTY, who are releasing a double cassette-tape box set featuring music created for unbuilt structures and conceptual cities including Richard Rogers' Zip Up House and Daniel Libeskind's Theatrum Mundi – Wonderfruit has been the perfect partner. ‘We developed a soundtrack for the new Ancestral Forest. All of our sounds for our soundscape, streamed in little pods dotted among the trees, were recorded in the original Miyawaki forest in Yokohama. The idea is that these sounds start small and quiet and, as the forest grows, so too will the complexity of our piece.’ Much like, we think, Wonderfruit itself.

Wonderfruit ran 15 - 18 December 2022

The Fields at Siam Country Club, Pattaya, Thailand

wonderfruit.co 

The finest architectural pavilions in the world

Pavilions are small-scale structures, with their size often allowing for greater experimentation and expression on the part of the architect. They serve as meeting points, shelters and socially-minded hubs for activity, debate and celebration – pavilions may be responses to socio-political issues or structures bringing communities together. They challenge people to integrate, interact and engage with their environment in new ways. Here’s our evolving selection of the finest architectural pavilions from around the world.

ArtPlay Pavilion, London, UK

Architect: Carmody Groarke
When: September 2025

Opening in September, the ArtPlay Pavilion at Dulwich Picture Gallery will be a permanent, playful structure designed for children up to eight years old. Created in collaboration with HoLD Art Collective and architect Carmody Groarke, the pavilion transforms classic paintings from the gallery’s collection into immersive, sensory experiences. Sculptural forms invite users to play and rest, encouraging hands-on engagement with art. The pavilion will be located in the gallery's reimagined Sculpture Garden.

Writer: Anna Solomon

Carbon Garden pavilion, London, UK

Architect: Mizzi Studio
When: July 2025

Unveiled in July 2025, this pavilion is the centrepiece of Kew Gardens’ new Carbon Garden – an educational landscape exploring carbon’s role in sustaining life. Designed by Jonathan Mizzi, the structure blends natural forms inspired by fungi, trees and carnivorous plants. Its translucent flax-fibre canopy collects rainwater, channelling it into a surrounding garden. Constructed from sustainable materials such as larch timber and larvikite stone rather than concrete, the pavilion serves as a hub for school visits and community events. AS

Down in the Clouds, Dun’ao Village, China

Architect: Practice on Earth and Increments Studio
When: April 2024

Completed in April 2024, Down in the Clouds consists of three structures that merge industrial and ethereal elements: a tower-like shipping container beneath a large canopy, a tilted unit with stepped seating, and cloud-like inflatable forms, which house a cafe, reading room and cinema. Designed by Practice on Earth and Increments Studio, this playful structure revitalises rural architecture while addressing the issue of local depopulation with community engagement. AS

Seaside Pavilion, Chaishan Island, China

Architect: GN Architects
When: August 2024

Located on a former cargo pier on an island in Zhoushan, China, this kinetic installation by GN Architects draws inspiration from traditional villages and its coastal setting. The pavilion features 36 slender blades of local fishing net stretched over a steel frame, anchored by reinforced steel to withstand stand winds and typhoons. The installation symbolises harmony between local culture and the natural environment, strengthening village identity through architectural storytelling. AS

Social housing pavilion, Mexico City, Mexico

Architect: AMASA Estudio
When: 2024

In 2024, a neglected domed pavilion at the UH INFONAVIT Iztacalco complex in Mexico City was revitalised by AMASA Estudio. Originally built in 1972, the structure was reinforced with steel and concrete and given a vibrant corrugated metal roof. Surrounding courtyards were also updated with new seating, fitness equipment and accessible walkways – the project demonstrates how thoughtful, low-cost interventions can rejuvenate urban housing infrastructure. AS

Drop-Stop Pavilion, Yandang, China

Architect: Aptdotapt
When: 2024

The mountaintop Drop-Stop Pavilion, imagined by Aptdotapt, is a triangular structure crafted from charred timber and transparent glass tiles that recall traditional Chinese eaves. A circular stainless-steel mirror roof filters sunlight, while rainwater collects in tiered pools that frame mountain views. The design blends sustainability with sensory experience, inviting visitors to interact with weather and landscape in poetic ways. AS

Parque Quintana Roo, Chetumal, Mexico

Architect: Aidia Studio
When: May 2025

In May 2025, Aidia Studio transformed a former seasonal fairground into Parque Quintana Roo – a 10-hectare urban park. The design features light, circular pavilions topped with geometrically patterned roofs, arranged in a parametric layout inspired by river deltas. Existing trees were preserved and supplemented, creating shaded paths that link amenities including a civic square, skate park, playgrounds and a 1,000-person arena. The result is a dynamic public space that blends community programming with biophilic design. AS

The Duho Pavilion, Cayman Islands

Architect: Limbo Accra. Landscape architect: Malthe Mørck Clausen
When: 2024

The Duho Pavilion greets visitors walking through a Caribbean forest site on the Cayman Islands. The conceptual piece – the brainchild of spatial design studio Limbo Accra in collaboration with landscape architect Malthe Mørck Clausen – features slender shapes and a deep integration with its environment. The design – Limbo Accra's first permanent public landscape architectural project – is equally akin to art; it's the result of a commission by Open Palm, part of the Palm Heights residency programme, curated by Keshav Anand.

Writer: Ellie Stathaki

Emerald Screen Pergola, Wuxi, China

Architect: Wutopia Lab
When: 2024

With its ethereal volume and lightweight appearance, the Emerald Screen Pergola is an intriguing feature at the Bogong Island Ecology Park in Wuxi, China. Designed by Chinese studio Wutopia Lab, the project, a light structure and sheltered corridor, is perhaps more of an abstract folly and a structured landscape, created especially for its green setting. Its aim? To inject 'magical realism' into the everyday. ES

Orchid Pavilion, Casa Wabi, Mexico

Architect: CCA Centro de Colaboración Arquitectónica
When: 2023

Orchid Pavilion – a new piece of timber architecture dedicated to the conservation of the eponymous flower in the Oaxaca region of Mexico – is set against an idyllic backdrop of blue skies and lush foliage. The structure, which was inaugurated at Puerto Escondido's Casa Wabi Foundation, was designed by Mexico City's Bernardo Quinzaños and his team at CCA Centro de Colaboración Arquitectónica. The Orchid Pavilion is part of the non-profit art and community organisation campus' rich and growing collection of architecture pavilions and buildings – from Tadao Ando's first commissions for the foundation’s founder, artist Bosco Sodi, to later additions such as Kengo Kuma's chicken coop. ES

Teahouse Ø, Copenhagen, Denmark 

Architect: Pan-Projects
When: 2021

A serene temporary structure designed by Pan-Projects in Copenhagen, the Teahouse Ø is part building, part boat. Kazumasa Takada and Yuriko Yagi’s studio created the project for the city’s re-zoning of its post-industrial waterfront as a new urban space, in collaboration with the Danish Arts Foundation. Teahouse Ø uses a curtain of shimmering acrylic strands to accentuate the haze and sparkle of the water. ES

Sarbalé Ke, Coachella Valley, California

Architect: Kéré Architecture
When: 2019

A series of pavilions inspired by the form of the Burkinabè baobab tree were designed by Kéré Architecture for Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2019 (they were later relocated to a permanent location in the Eastern Coachella Valley). The tree has a hollow trunk that develops holes or ‘sky lights’ in its structure as it grows. This was the inspiration for the ventilated, light-filled interiors, that provided cool sanctuaries for festival-goers. The 12 pavilions, made of steel structures and clad with colourful timber panels, varied in size, with the tallest reaching 19m and the largest created by a grouping of three structures together. The title ‘Sarbalé Ke’ is translated as ‘House of Celebration’ in Moore, a language spoken in parts of Burkina Faso, where architect Francis Kéré is from. ES

Module+, Thanh Chuong, Nghe An, Vietnam

Architect: Nguyen Khac Phuoc Architects and Dang + Partners
When: 2018

Nguyen Khac Phuoc Architects and Dang + Partners are behind the design of Module + in Vietnam. Adjacent to the water at Than Chuong Tea Island (a series of small hills weaving through the Thanh Thinh and Thanh An communes), this pavilion was designed to be a stopover for farmers, in turn encouraging connectivity and gathering among the local community. The lattice-like structure of the pavilion constitutes over 2,000 plastic and wooden pieces, which were shipped to the site by boat and assembled by the area’s locals within three days. ES

Pergola in Luotuowan Village, Luotuowan Village, China

Architect: LUO Studio
When: 2018

This pergola, designed for the local residents as a place to rest, relax and take shade during long walks, draws on the particularities of its remote site, and the nature of the local vernacular (its host village was mostly built through reclamation of mountain and wasteland). LUO Studio was inspired by Richard Buckminster Fuller's ‘dymaxion', which advocates maximum gain from minimal energy input – the team aimed to create something contemporary and solid, but also efficient and clever. The structure echoes nature, using wood as the main construction material. The timber used was reclaimed from demolished buildings in the area, and the different wood block sizes give the structure its unique character. ES

Liquid Pavilion, Porto, Portugal

Architect: Depa Architects
When: 2017

This pavilion, designed by the Porto-based studio Depa Architects is built of dark glass that reflects its leafy surroundings. The mysterious geometric form appears to float on a lake in the middle of Serralves Park, while the mirrored exterior walls enable the pavilion to become a canvas for its context. Its shape is lifted from the architectural plan of the Serralves Museum, echoing the hexagonal matrix of one of its central spaces, a shape that is also featured in the landscaping of the park. Inside, the pavilion is neutral, with stripped back interiors. ES

The People’s Station, Kwan-Yen district of Yantai, China

Architect: People’s Architecture Office
When: 2017

The People’s Station is an event space and a base for exploring the historic centre of the town in which it is located. Wide open entranceways and light-filled spaces welcome members of the community, while upstairs there is a lounge, bookstore, cinema and outdoor terraces on each floor. The organic and dynamic form is modular in appearance, with ‘portable appendages’. These ‘tricycle houses’ are event spaces on wheels that can transport the activities of the People’s Station around the town like satellites. ES

Renzo Piano Photography Pavilion, Provence, France

Architect: Renzo Piano
When: 2017

Sunken 6m into a 500 acre vineyard in Provence, Renzo Piano’s Photography Pavilion at Château La Coste opened back in 2017 with an exhibition from Hiroshi Sugimoto. The 285 sq m pavilion still hosts photography exhibitions, as well as preserving wine within its cellars. Piano’s dynamic roof, lowered to ground level, is a focal point. It takes the form of a sail, connected with thin metal arches and alternating concrete ribs and glazing, which is anchored to the exposed concrete walls of the pavilion. At the back of the structure a concrete platform provides a space for sculpture. ES

Lebanon-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh has just been announced as the designer behind the coveted Serpentine Pavilion 2023 commission. The project, an image of which has also been unveiled today, will represent the pavilion's 22nd iteration, set to open in London's Kensington Gardens. The architect is now joining the star-studded list of past Serpentine architectural pavilion creators, which spans from Zaha Hadid (2000) to Francis Kéré (2017), Frida Escobedo (2018), and Theaster Gates (last year's commission). 

'We are thrilled to present Lina Ghotmeh’s first structure in the UK here at Serpentine next summer,' say Bettina Korek, chief executive, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at Serpentine Galleries. 'Her design for À table [the pavilion] draws on natural elements that reflect its surroundings in Kensington Gardens and expands on our mission of creating connections between architecture and society by promoting unity and togetherness in its form and function. We are endlessly grateful to our loyal partners and supporters, for making Ghotmeh’s brilliant concept for a pavilion built from state-of-the-art sustainable materials into an inspiring reality, for the people of London and for our visitors from around the world to enjoy all summer. As Etel Adnan once told us, “The world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation“.'

Ghotmeh is head of her eponymous practice, Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture, based in Paris. Her portfolio includes a range of commissions, from public to private work, and from cultural to commercial, operating internationally. The architect has already scooped a multitude of awards including the 2020 Schelling Architecture Prize. She teaches architecture and is a member of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2022 jury. 

Lina Ghotmeh and the Serpentine Pavilion 2023

Ghotmeh's design for the Serpentine Pavilion 2023 is titled À table – a 'French call for people to sit down together at a table'. It is conceived to nod to ideas of unity and discussion, common ground and meaningful human interaction. 

'À table is an invitation to dwell together, in the same space and around the same table. It is an encouragement to enter into a dialogue, to convene and to think about how we could reinstate and re-establish our relationship to nature and the Earth,' says Ghotmeh. 'The Earth that embraces us is our first source of sustenance; without it, we living beings could not survive. Rethinking what and how much we eat – how we “consume” and how we weave our relationships to one another and the living world – moves us towards a more sustainable, eco-systemic communion with the Earth. Our “cuisine” grounds us home; it reminds us how linked we are to the climates in which we grew up. As a Mediterranean woman, born and raised in Beirut, and living in Paris, I feel a deep belonging to our ground, to what it contains, and to what it embraces: from the buried yet weathering archaeologies of past civilisations to the embedded living world that spurs green life to sprout from every crack in the streets.'

serpentinegalleries.org

linaghotmeh.com

An imposing cluster of slim concrete columns rises amid the ever-evolving landscape of Canberra's Dairy Road neighbourhood. The area is a formerly industrial part of the Australian capital city, now slowly transforming into a diverse, modern, mixed-use district. One of its latest additions is Less, an architectural pavilion created by developer Molonglo and designed by Chilean architecture studio Pezo von Ellrichshausen. 

The celebrated and multi-award-winning architecture studio, headed by partners Sofia von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo, is known for its dramatic, sculptural works – often in its home country of Chile, and in textured concrete – which cut imposing, mesmerising contemporary figures in both urban and natural landscapes. With the new Less pavilion, the architects followed their signature approach, carving a collection of 36 vertical concrete elements and a circular ramp, which leads visitors up to a viewing platform. 

A stream runs below the structure, slow, shallow but continuous, adding dynamism through its perpetual movement and freshness through the water's cooling presence. Around it, 6,000 individual plants of more than 50 different species have been placed to grow and age alongside the structure, many of which are local, and help tie the piece to its surroundings.

Conceived as an experiential piece of public art, a city landmark and a community gathering spot, Less is there to be seen and visited by all. ‘Avoiding a deterministic or transactional approach to use and presence, Less invites the evolving community to interact with and occupy its varied spaces as they see fit,' the architects explain. ‘[It's] Less than a structure, an infrastructure. It is an idiosyncratic place that refuses to be called in a single manner, with a single word.' 

The simple geometries, structures and repetitive format of the pavilion feel steady and reassuring – yet its existence belies a sense of boldness, balancing movement and stillness, the architects argue: 'In its monotonous gesture, in its tedious regularity as much as in its lack of direction, bold columns and slender pillars erode any other function than that of framing every other function. Many events are allowed in unlabelled places.'

INFORMATION

pezo.cl

molonglo.com

The Donum Estate, a 200-acre winery nestled between California’s Napa and Sonoma counties, ranks among the world’s top destinations for outdoor sculpture. Its enviable holdings include a dozen bronze Zodiac Heads by Ai Weiwei, an apparently abandoned lead warplane by Anselm Kiefer, a giant pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama, and a stainless steel banyan tree sprouting dishes and pots by Subodh Gupta. But when Olafur Eliasson accepted an invitation from owners Mei and Allan Warburg to visit Donum three years ago, he wanted to contribute a piece of architecture rather than a sculpture.

‘It’s not about making a monument. The most important thing about a winery is the moment the wine goes into your mouth, so that’s what we set out to focus on: a wine-tasting pavilion,’ explains the artist as we meet in Berlin this April. Also present is Sebastian Behmann, his architectural collaborator since 2001 and fellow co-founder of Studio Other Spaces. The studio is known for its experiments at the intersection of architecture and art, with projects including Fjordenhus, the headquarters of an investment firm in Vejle, Denmark; The Seeing City, a permanent installation for the top two floors of a Paris skyscraper; and the upcoming Common Sky, a canopy of glass and mirrors for the courtyard of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

For Eliasson, wine is ‘a testimony to the Earth’. Its taste can be shaped by the winemaker, but ultimately it is determined by the landscape, its biodiversity, and of course the weather – a perennial occupation dating back to The Weather Project (2003), his seminal installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. His Vertical Panorama Pavilion at Donum Estate, which opens today (1 August 2022), is an ode to the natural conditions that make wine possible – a particularly fitting approach seeing as ‘Donum’ means ‘gift of the land’ in Latin. The pavilion’s defining feature is a conical canopy, 14.5m in diameter and comprising 832 colourful glass tiles that tell the story of the local weather. ‘It’s about celebrating the ephemeral, bringing to your attention everything that’s often unquantifiable, and therefore often forgotten.’

But first, the site. Studio Other Spaces was after a peaceful spot, not too close to Donum’s sculptures but also not too far. ‘We then wanted a substantial view over the estate to the north, but also towards the bay to the south. A site where you have everything in view, where you can look around and see the whole environment that constitutes the wine,’ says Behmann. Another requirement was that Donum’s other architecture should be largely out of view (there’s a wine production facility, a hospitality centre, and a white-cube conservation facility that houses artworks by Louise Bourgeois and El Anatsui), so visitors to the pavilion could admire an uninterrupted horizon, ‘where the sky meets the Earth’.

Eliasson and Behmann identified a small hill that met their needs, and the Warburgs agreed to relocate a Corten steel sculpture by Keith Haring to make way for the new pavilion. Then came the task of landscaping: the south-east part of the site was elevated to break the prevailing winds, and a winding gravel path was cut through the land to take visitors below ground level. As you meander along, you see the terrain rise around you – a reminder that soil is not only the ground you walk on, but also a home for roots and microorganisms. ‘By the time you arrive, you are in the ground below. You will have detoxed from the world outside Donum and sensitised yourself to experience the wine,’ says Eliasson.

The soil is the first of three layers in Studio Other Spaces’ vertical panorama concept, which takes you on a journey across several layers of Donum. ‘It’s bringing the horizontal idea of the panorama into one that is organised vertically,’ describes Behmann. The second layer is the flora and fauna, which appears at eye height as you enter the circular arrival space in the centre of the pavilion. This unusual perspective encourages you to inhale the scent of the grass, listen as it rustles in the wind, tune in to the chirping of insects, and admire the fluttering of butterflies. Your perception of the turf is further heightened by the light streaming through the deliberately low glass canopy, which dapples the space with kaleidoscopic hues. The effect is dazzling, dreamlike and characteristically Eliasson.

The arrival space opens into two further circular areas: a smaller service space, lined with cabinetry; and a larger tasting space, with elliptical brass tables and seating for twelve along its perimeter. Entering the tasting space, you sit down on thickly padded benches and lean against ovoid cushions that, according to Behmann, are inspired by ‘how squirrels put their things in the ground’. Having taken in the view of the bay to the south, your eyes are now trained on the canopy, which Studio Other Spaces have conceived as a calendar wheel. The 832 glass tiles consist of 24 colours in variations of translucent and transparent hues, giving visual form to the yearly averages of four meteorological parameters: wind, humidity, temperature and solar radiance. As Eliasson puts it, ‘you are looking at everything that has informed what you are about to taste’, the weather behind Donum’s renowned Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. An oculus in the centre of the canopy means your gaze will eventually settle on the azure skies.

Each of the four parameters is represented by individual rings within the calendar wheel, and there is a precise logic to the colours: for instance red stands for high temperatures and blue for low temperatures. But Eliasson and Behmann say that the canopy is not meant to be read as an infographic. Instead, its purpose is to make you aware of the elements. ‘It also gives credit to our subconscious to play a significant role in perceiving taste, light and colour,’ suggests Eliasson. ‘To offer people a legend to decipher the calendar would take attention away from the wine.’

The artist points out that in wine tasting sessions, and indeed in art exhibitions, there is a danger of inundating people with information and prescribing specific takeaways, ‘so they feel really stupid when they leave. It’s important not to talk down to people, but rather empower them to grow and flourish’. Though the Vertical Panorama Pavilion is immediately identifiable as an Eliasson project, it is also deliberately non prescriptive. Rather than imposing an artificial intervention (for instance, opting for an unconventional roof shape), the pavilion simply opens your senses to the natural surroundings, and affirms your appreciation of Donum’s wine.

He adds that ‘having different experiences of a wine is not necessarily a conflict. It is simply an acknowledgement of the potential of being together without having to be the same. There is an element of generosity to this, and of believing in a diverse tomorrow.’

Just as the intent of the Vertical Panorama Pavilion reflects Eliasson’s social convictions, its material palette and construction also align with his environmentalism: the low walls that line the pathway and pavilion interior are made of an earthy brick from nearby Sacramento (‘the idea is to use as much local knowledge and material intelligence as possible,’ says Behmann). The twelve columns supporting the glass canopy, and the structure of the canopy itself are all stainless steel, which eliminates the need for coatings and lends itself to eventual recycling. The 832 panels are made from recycled glass. The canopy’s concentric grid is backed by a spiral shell, which Behmann explains is a material saving construction: ‘As always, we work with the same mindset as architects like Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller, minimising material efforts by mimicking natural constructions and natural forms of growing.’ 

This passion for sustainability has certainly resonated with the Warburgs, who have championed biodynamic processes at Donum, alongside regenerative farming practices such as composting, biochar and livestock integration. ‘This pavilion blends perfectly with what we strive to achieve – a holistic sensory experience drawing on our passions of wine, nature and art, design and architecture,’ they say. ‘The design principles, set in the Californian light, will create a sensorial experience that draws on Donum’s participation in the natural world, to enhance the experience of all our visitors.’ 

INFORMATION

Vertical Panorama Pavilion is at the Donum Estate, 24500 Ramal Road, Sonoma, CA, thedonumestate.com; studiootherspaces.net

A version of this article will appear in the October 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + on 8 September 2022. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today!

With Beacons, the newest stage at south London’s premiere dance festival Gala, architects Joe Halligan, Daniel Waterstone and Adam Willis of studio JAM sought to create a space that achieved ‘equality' amongst performing artists and audience. ‘Instead of everyone looking at one particular point, it's about trying to get back this feeling of the house party, a relaxed, more informal way of enjoying music,' says Halligan, as the colourful pavilions are being constructed ahead of the music festival (its opening took place last week).

Beacons comprises four architectural structures in Peckham Rye Park. They include a vibrant orange cuboid-shaped platform for dancing with gestural staircases either side, and a dramatic turquoise tower, designed to act as a literal beacon, beckoning festival-goers and inadvertently serving as a crucial meeting point. 

The structures are made from inexpensive, reusable materials such as truss, decking and balustrade, and then wrapped in debris netting typically used on scaffolding. The netting comes in standard colours, like red, green, blue and white, which were then layered to create secondary colours.

In daylight, the sun shines through the netting, creating a moiré effect, whilst at night the festival lights cast silhouettes of stage dwellers dancing on the so-called beacons. By platforming the audience above the artists’ stage, Halligan hoped to ‘level the hierarchy', which typically exists between the two groups. ‘I think it means that there'll be an element of performance in the audience as well, as they’ll be viewed in a similar way to the artists,' added Waterstone. ‘It creates a direct dialogue between the artists and the people viewing them from within similar structures.'

The collaboration with Gala festival is one of the first projects from JAM, a new multidisciplinary design studio formed after Halligan and Willis parted ways with the award-winning collective Assemble, of which they were co-founders. This pivot into music-related design is a departure from the sort of work they did with Assemble, which was the first-ever collective and the first ‘non-artists’ to win the prestigious Turner Prize Award, in 2015. So why part ways with a collective they helped co-found after enjoying such success?

‘I think it was just a desire to work in a smaller group, work in a more focused way,' Halligan explains. A desire to work with Waterstone, with whom Halligan and Willis studied under the late Florian Beigel, also inspired the schism. ‘Assemble was lots of different people from different backgrounds that you'd not necessarily have trained in,' Halligan explains. ‘We have a very similar education and frame of reference. We've had a decade in between of doing different stuff but the foundations are the same.’ 

The Beacons project stems from a shared belief amongst the architects that music festivals are an ideal setting in which to appreciate architecture and design. ‘A lot of the key experiences people have in their lives relate to times they've been with their friends, experiencing music, be it at festivals or nightclubs,' Halligan says. ‘I think these settings, particularly at festivals, are not always considered. Lighting is very good these days and sound’s got really good but in terms of making spaces architectural, I feel like there's a lot that could still happen.'

Part of the beauty of designing for festivals, Halligan continues, is that these temporary ‘buildings’ are constructed in days and not designed to be long-lasting, providing a sort of instant gratification for the architect compared to the months or years they might wait to see a building come to fruition. Creating temporary structures also allows the designer to have more fun and take more risks with the materials they use. ‘With temporary buildings, you should be much more ambitious,' says Halligan. ‘It's not going to be there for that long so if you're not taking advantage of the opportunity of it being temporary, then you're not really pushing yourself enough.'

JAM’s collaboration with Gala is part of a growing trend of architecture and design playing more of a role at music festivals, which have traditionally been considered purely in terms of their line-up of bands and DJs. ‘Festivals like Gala or Horst are putting equal weight on the people designing the stages as the line-ups. It's not just about the musicians, it's like, this stage was designed by this Italian architect or this amazing Belgian practice,' he explains. 

‘It's really good, I think, because architecture is not that popular,' Halligan laughs. ‘As David Knight said, if planning applications were as popular as music is, then we'd have much better cities because people would be demanding it!'

INFORMATION

j-a-m.co

How do you create a sacred space? Theaster Gates seeks to resolve this question with Black Chapel, his design for this year’s Serpentine Pavilion. It’s a fitting task for the Chicago-based artist, who has received international acclaim for his community and cultural interventions in Black space, particularly on the South Side of Chicago.

Nestled in London’s Kensington Gardens, the monumental black pavilion, realised with architecture studio Adjaye Associates, at once conjures up traditional concepts of the chapel, but also is securely rooted in the ideas of monumentality, taking up space, and disruption by way of creating peace and tranquillity. Instantly imposing, yet quietly meditative, it is a confident and sure statement and testament to Black communities, encouraging quietude, reflection and a retreat to nature. ‘I hope that folks from further afield than Hyde Park can find solace in this space,’ says Gates. Standing in his chapel, looking up at the oculus, it feels apt to transport oneself back in time and consider the Pantheon.

The Pantheon, completed around 126-128 AD during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, is one of the best-preserved monuments of ancient Rome, with its focal feature being a rotunda with a massive domed ceiling that has formed a lasting inspiration in the minds of artists and architects alike. The largest structure of its kind when it was built, the Pantheon is situated where an earlier structure with the same name, built around 25 BC by Marcus Agrippa, once stood. It is thought to have been designed as a temple for the gods.

At 16m in diameter and 10.7m high, Gates’ chapel is the largest Serpentine Pavilion to date, with a 201 sq m cylinder that dominates with formidable yet comforting grace. Gates’ architectural references include the beehive kilns of the American West, the traditional forms of Cameroon’s Musgum mud huts, Uganda’s Kasubi Tombs, and industrial structures such as bottle kilns in Stoke-on-Trent (the heart of the British ceramic industry).

Here, Gates draws on his own ceramic practice whilst connecting with the history of religious structures such as a 16th-century Tempietto in Rome designed by Donato Bramante, the Umbrian architect who would later design St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Meaning ‘little temple’ the Tempietto is a small, circular church whose design mixes the aesthetic intentions of sculpture with the spiritual ideals of an ancient pagan temple, resting heavily on and honouring Classical aesthetics – a style popular during the Italian Renaissance, and assuring harmony and order. The elements are mathematically proportioned, a unity and simplicity also achieved in Gates’ investigations into clay. Black Chapel fuses spirituality with a multicultural High Renaissance.

The concept of a sacred space finds its origins in the very beginnings of civilisation, with iterations and reimaginings appearing in various cultures. It is significant – a universal construct that proves its necessity and healing power in its prominence and recalibration throughout history. Sacred spaces such as Black Chapel introduce meaningful experiences to the vast, homogenous expanse that city life can envelop us in.

Who are Gates’ gods? ‘I want to encourage Black presence,’ he asserts.

Gates, through a robust set of programming curated with the Serpentine, will activate the Chapel. And so we witness a hierophany, as interventions and activations of the pavilion seek to fundamentally alter our relationship with space and time. The measure of any architectural structure is its ability to transcend the contemporary and the historical, to transport those within into a world of the artist's design, and thus achieve a purpose. For Gates, this is to give form and space to Black meditative sound, convert the monastic to the contemporary and, as he divulges, ‘encourage ideas about performance and aesthetic traditions’.

As is typical in Gates’ practice, music is a fundamental component of the pavilion, which will host church choirs, experimental piano composers, and jazz musicians, building up to October’s closing performances by Grammy award-winning singer Corinne Bailey Rae and Gates’ ensemble The Black Monks, whose music offers a powerful celebration of Eastern monastic sound with the soulful musical backbone of the American South. Sitting outside the chapel is a large bronze bell, salvaged from St Laurence, a demolished Catholic church and landmark of Chicago’s South Side. Gates is known for excavating abandoned buildings such as St Laurence for new meaning, and previously exhibited a statue of the patron saint.

For his pavilion, Gates was inspired by the ‘transcendental environment’ of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas – home to 14 dark-hued paintings by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. Gates’ new series of seven tar paintings – using layered, blow-torched roofing materials that reference his late father’s trade as a roofer – live in his Black Chapel. The artist knows that light is powerful. The history of the Rothko Chapel set an artistic precedent for this lesson: for almost five decades, the light in this chapel was not right. The Texas sun blasted through the original transparent skylight, obliterating the vision of dusky paintings and hindering the spiritual encounter Rothko envisioned for the space. 

In Black Chapel, Gates has achieved a resolve and a future-thinking piece that honours many legacies. The oculus anointing us with grey London light is a poignant reminder of the power of nature, and of looking up. It is a window to consider an ever-changing world; as sunlight brings joy, and the nocturnal sky fascinates with a sense of the unknown, we too can be blinded by the light, and overpowered by nature. Historically, religions have used these experiences of light to emphasise the mysticism of their deities, echoing this idea in the design of buildings. Here, Gates encourages us to consider the mysticism of contemporary life.

The interaction of lightness and blackness in the chapel thus conjures a socio-political juxtaposition and focus. Bathed in the grey-white light from our cloudy skies, it is a place for all to congregate, and a welcoming gesture to the Black community. Looking up, we consider all that we hope for. We all look at the same sky – we always have. 

Gates’ chapel is a unifying devotion to the spiritual as a force to connect, provide safety, and encourage thinking beyond the limits of this world. Urgent and politically ambitious, Black Chapel believes in inspiration and healing as a catalyst for progression. Gates, who is dedicated to a social practice that revives communities, has brought his spirit to London. Let the legacy unfold.

INFORMATION

Black Chapel is on view at the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens until 16 October 2022. serpentinegalleries.org

Sat at the heart of a Unesco World Heritage Site, Cheshire's Jodrell Bank in England, the First Light Pavilion is quietly nestled in the green landscape's rolling hills. The site, by the small town of Macclesfield, is home to an observatory first established in 1945 by radio astronomer Bernard Lovell, and it includes the impressive Lovell Telescope. Now, this new piece of pavilion architecture, designed by Hassell, has been added to the popular tourist destination, as a centre that welcomes visitors who want to find out more about astronomy, science and technology at Jodrell Bank and beyond. 

The pavilion ‘aims to open up the inspirational history of Jodrell Bank by engaging visitors with the fantastic stories of its pioneering scientists and their groundbreaking feats of science and engineering', offers a Jodrell Bank statement. At the same time, its architecture, defined by gentle concrete curves, was conceived to be subtle and respond to its leafy context and the nearby, familiar forms of the Lovell Telescope and astronomy equipment in general.

The First Light Pavilion's 76m-diameter dome is topped by grass, ensuring it commands a clear, yet discreet presence in the Jodrell Bank campus. Inside, exhibition designer Casson Mann composed a display that tells the story of the site and the science ‘of the exploration of the universe using radio waves instead of visible light'. Within the exhibits, interactive projected animations by digital media studio Squint/Opera, in partnership with exhibition builder Realm and software developer ISO, promise an informative and engaging visit for guests.

‘That transformational development in this quiet corner of Cheshire completely opened up humanity's understanding of the universe and allowed us to discover previously undreamt of things such as pulsars, quasars, and even the fading glow of the Big Bang,' says professor Tim O'Brien, associate director at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. Jodrell Bank is host to the world’s oldest existing radio astronomy observatory, and the First Light Pavilion visitor centre celebrates this through its gentle presence and contextual nature. 

INFORMATION

hassellstudio.com

jodrellbank.net

The latest addition to Château La Coste’s ever increasing collection of architectural pavilions and art installations is billed as the final project drawn by Oscar Niemeyer. As recently as 2020, the owner of a Leipzig tram factory proudly claimed that a 40ft concrete and glass sphere, pinned to the top corner of one of his buildings and housing a restaurant and bar, represented Niemeyer’s last design (see W*241). As it turns out, Paddy McKillen, the founder of Château La Coste, has simply taken longer to finish his rather more substantial project. And even now, ten years after Niemeyer’s death, just a few days short of his 105th birthday, there are still schemes being worked on that carry his name.

Set in the rolling landscape of Provence and home to works by the likes of Frank Gehry, Tracey Emin, Tadao Ando, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer and Ai Weiwei, Château La Coste now has an 80-seat auditorium that sits inside a circular white concrete drum, attached like a hinge to a teardrop-shaped, 4,000 sq ft glass-walled gallery. It sits in a dip in the vineyards that surround the hotel at Château La Coste, and is reached by a path that curls languidly through the vines, entering the pavilion across a shallow reflecting pool. These are motifs familiar from Niemeyer’s earlier buildings. He used water everywhere, from Brasilia to his office building for Mondadori on the edge of Milan. The confrontation of a drum-shaped solid element, with transparent free form glass, is a paraphrase of the cultural centre in Le Havre that he finished in 1983.

Niemeyer’s astonishingly long architectural career began in the 1930s when he was a young assistant in a team supervised by Le Corbusier designing Brazil’s ministry of education in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1940s, he met Juscelino Kubitschek, then mayor of Belo Horizonte, the city in which he designed his first independent buildings. After the war, Niemeyer sparred with Le Corbusier to shape the multi-authored United Nations building in New York. When Kubitschek became Brazil’s president, he appointed Niemeyer as the architect of his new capital city, Brasilia.

As a communist, Niemeyer left the country in 1964, when the army took over the government. While in exile, he built the headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris, a venue later selected by Miuccia Prada in which to show a collection. He is certainly the only architect to have been awarded both the Pritzker Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize.

After 2006, Niemeyer became increasingly frail, though that did not stop him from marrying his 60-year-old assistant Vera Lucia Cabreira at the age of 98. In 2011, McKillen visited his studio in Rio, above the beach at Copacabana, to talk about Niemeyer’s project for him. ‘Oscar beckoned me towards a picture in his office of swimmers on Ipanema Beach, suggesting the building would be inspired by the female form,’ McKillen recalls. ‘I remember clearly his many questions on the vineyards at Château La Coste, and how he expressed his love for a good glass of red wine.’

By that time, the architect’s sight was deteriorating. He relied on his sense of touch to feel architectural models, and lightboxes to read the drawings made for him by his staff. He could no longer manage to do his party piece for the flow of visitors who came to see him. Until he was well over 90, he would ask them to name any of his many buildings, produce a pen and, without pausing to think, capture its essence with a single fluent black line on a sheet of butcher’s paper pinned to an easel. His assistant would unpin it, fold it up and present it as a gift.

Niemeyer had long since stopped travelling. He never saw the Serpentine Pavilion, unveiled in his absence in 2003. Nor did he go to the opening of his last sizeable project finished while he was still alive, the ill-fated Niemeyer Cultural Centre in Spain, which closed nine months after it opened in 2011, before reopening the next year under new management.

Jair Valera, an assistant who had worked for Niemeyer since 1974, went to see Château La Coste on his behalf in 2010. He walked the site, chose a location and went back to Brazil. In conversation with Niemeyer, he came up with four or five proposals. McKillen selected the one that has finally been realised. It sits on land protected by the local authority as agricultural, and so it took a protracted period of persuasion to secure the necessary permissions before McKillen’s team built the structure standing here today.

The Château La Coste project is unlikely to be the end of it. In Brazil, the appetite for posthumous Niemeyer projects, large and small, is seemingly insatiable. The year after Niemeyer’s death, his office, which by then was being run by Valera, alongside Niemeyer’s granddaughter, the late Ana Elisa Niemeyer (also an architect), picked up several large new projects, including a research park in northern Brazil and an aquarium planned for a coastal suburb of Rio. Back in France, with the final touches applied as we write, Niemeyer's pavilion at Château La Coste opens to the public this month.

INFORMATION

chateau-la-coste.com

Melbourne’s vibrant architecture scene has been bolstered by the opening of two joyful, temporary architecture projects this week. Get ready to welcome the 2021 MPavilion and the Architecture Commission by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Here, colour and playfulness rule.

Melbourne’s two new temporary architecture pavilions

MPavilion

The annual MPavilion commission by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation is back after last year’s hiatus in Queen Victoria Gardens, adjacent to Melbourne Arts Precinct. The design by Venice-based MAP studio is composed of a 6m-tall grid that floats on prefabricated concrete supports and holds a set of mirrored aluminium panels to reflect light, as well as provide glimpses of other visitors and the pavilion’s bright yellow floor. 

Named The Lightcatcher, the pavilion functions as a stage around which people will gather to attend free performances, talks, workshops and children’s activities programmed over the summer months. When the pavilion closes in April 2022 it will be gifted to the state and relocated to a permanent home somewhere in Victoria, joining previous MPavilions that occupy a variety of sites from Docklands to Melbourne Zoo.

NGV Architecture Commission

Across the road from MPavilion, NGV has revealed its annual Architecture Commission in its sculpture garden. Entitled Pond[er], the design by architecture firm Taylor Knights in collaboration with artist James Carey is centred on a bright pink pond – wrapping around Henry Moore’s 1958 sculpture Draped Seated Woman – and beds of Australian wildflowers, designed with Ben Scott Garden Design to bloom at different times as the seasons change.

The striking pink hue is a reference to Victoria’s inland salt lakes. While visitors to the architectural garden are encouraged to wade through the pond, which holds about 45,000 litres of water, and take pleasure in this temporary oasis, the designers’ intention is for people to also consider the scarcity and political implications of water. According to the design team, ‘the way in which we have mismanaged and misused our land and water systems throughout Australia has seen a dramatic increase in extreme weather events, unprecedented drought, rising temperatures and ocean levels, and more recently, catastrophic bushfires'.

After the installation is removed, in October 2022, the materials used in its construction are to be distributed and reused by various Landcare, Indigenous, and community groups.

INFORMATION

mpavilion.org

ngv.vic.gov.au

An abandoned pump house outside Shanghai has been transformed into an architectural pavilion with a nod to the sacred, courtesy of Chinese architecture studio Wutopia Lab. The project, created at an idyllic spot within the Dongtanyuan's Qian Shao Farm, belonging to food and beverage multinational the Bright Food Group, is titled Shrine of Everyman, and reimagines a neglected piece of industrial architecture into an exploration of sacred space – an ethereal folly that invites the visitor in, as if in a dream.

The project’s brief outlined a rest stop for visitors and passers-by. The architects applied their signature flair and imagination – which has previously led to designs such as imaginative bookstores for Tianya Books and beautifully geometric exhibition centres, such as the The Aluminium Mountain – to their architectural solution, resulting in a reflective, cloud-like structure full of curves and mirrors. The pavilion, made of 13 layers of translucent polycarbonate panels, sits on a semi-circular shallow pool, carefully and delicately suspended just above the river. 

Inspiration came from chocolate – one of their client’s key products. ‘One of the key charms of traditional Chinese culture is that everyday places can be elevated into sacred spaces through the construction of shared memories,' says Wutopia Lab's lead architect Yu Ting. ‘That's when the chocolate came to my mind. Milk chocolate, reinvented by Shanghai's food industry (including the predecessor of Bright Food Group) during a time of material scarcity, was a boon to the Chinese people of that period and was once an integral part of Shanghai's culinary memory.

‘I decided to use milk chocolate as the theme of the pump room to awaken memories of ordinary people who were temporarily forgotten,’ he continues, ‘thus turning an abandoned facility into a sacred space for ordinary people – Shrine of Everyman.’

Reflecting this thinking in the small, 35 sq m structure, the architects created the shallow pool in a deep brown colour, while the structure above it is white – symbolising, respectively, chocolate and milk. Stepping inside, the visitor is drawn into a dream-like landscape, where they can explore, rest, or take in the views of the natural setting and Shanghai cityscape beyond.

INFORMATION

wutopialab.com

MPavilion, Melbourne’s annual architecture and design event and temporary pavilion, has returned for its eighth season after a pandemic-disrupted year. This year’s iteration, with a structure designed by MAP Studio, the Italian architecture practice of Francesco Magnani and Traudy Pelzel, is kicking off on 2 December and running until 24 April 2022 – the longest MPavilion programme yet.

There will be 250 free events at this year’s pavilion, called ‘The LightCatcher’, in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens, which will be preceded by an online programme from 23 November. A series of talks, workshops, community projects and activities will be held throughout, with each month considering a different theme. In November, Island Life will be examined; in December, That Which Makes Things Visible; in January, Vacation, Location, Staycation; and in February, Rituals: Marking Life. The final two months will consider the bigger picture, with March looking at Design as a Human Right, and April, The Reality of this Time.

‘Following two years of uncertainty, MPavilion 2021 provides an optimistic beacon of post-pandemic recovery for the creative life of our city,’ says Naomi Milgrom AC, founder of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation. ‘MAP studio’s MPavilion will bring the community together and renew connections in a safe environment for our first season back in the Queen Victoria Gardens. Driven by our mission to champion architecture and design, our partnership with MAP and the diversity of this year’s programme promises to reinvigorate the dialogue between Melbourne and the rest of the world.’

Over 500 guests from Australia and around the world will participate in talks that include discussions from Grand Designs Australia host and architect Peter Maddison, design collective Space Saloon, and architects including Sean Godsell Architects, MOS, MVRDV, Sauerbruch Hutton, Bolles+Wilson, and Snøhetta. The talks will take place alongside MProjects, unique creations and residencies.

The MPavilion programme of events will encompass everything from tracing the journey of Skywhalepapa, the giant hot-air-balloon sculpture by Patricia Piccinini as it sets off over Melbourne, to the three-day forum on Indigenous architecture, BLAKitecture: The Manifesto.

INFORMATION

mpavilion.org

The architect Konstantin Ikonomidis, Swedish but of Greek extraction, is currently stationed in a small museum in Sisimiut, just above the Arctic Circle in Greenland. The view out of his window is as ridiculously perfect as you would imagine it to be, a jumble of brightly coloured pitched-roof houses on a rocky headland of muted grey and green. About an hour’s sail north is the village of Sarfannguit (you pretty much have to fly, sail or dogsled to get anywhere in Greenland). High on a hill above the village, Ikonomidis has just installed Qaammat, two curved walls of glass brick, a kind of striking shelter-come-cairn or permanent ‘pavilion’ as he calls it, for Unesco.

The area around Sarfannguit, stretching from Aasivissuit to Nipisat, was declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 2018, Greenland's third. The new glass pavilion was commissioned by Unesco in 2019, intended as a celebration of the local landscape, cultural as well as physical, and the Inuit community’s connection with that landscape (Greenland is almost 90 per cent Inuit or European-Inuit).

Ikonomidis has been in Greenland since 2017, based in the capital Nuuk before the move to Sisimiut (population 5,600ish), the country’s second city. Fascinated by house building traditions and extreme climates, he considered Greenland fertile ground. ‘I was asked to make some kind of small house for the Nuuk Nordisk Culture Festival and I didn’t want to just make a beautiful house you just walk into and walk out,’ he says. ‘I was trying to go a little bit beyond the obvious.’ Ikonomidis came up with Qamutit, a conceptual sled-house. ‘At the time, I was building a traditional kayak in the Greenlandic style, where you actually tie things together with ropes. And that structure is mostly tied together in the same way.'

Qamutit is essentially timber scaffolding lashed to large skis. Its construction employed other traditional Inuit building techniques, where wooden poles are placed in accurately cut holes instead of bolted or screwed together. This combination of lashing and slotting means that Inuit sleds have enough give and take to survive travelling long distances on ice and snow. Ikonomidis attached Douglas fir panels to the scaffolding poles and visitors were asked to share their thoughts on what makes a house a home, posting them on one of the panels. 

‘Unesco had seen the sled house and wanted to collaborate,’ he says, ‘so we visited Sarfannguit to look for a potential site for an installation.’ This time he wanted the work to be fixed and permanent: ‘The budget was really low but it is so beautiful there and I wanted to bring attention to the village.'

He also wanted to make sure that the work reflected the lives, ideas and traditions of the Sarfannguit residents. ‘I wanted to find out what they wanted,’ says Ikonomidis. ‘I asked them to talk about nature, what it meant to them and what their relationship to it was,’ he says. ‘There is a sense of its power here because everything is oversized, with these big mountains. There is a respect, a sensitivity to it but also a sense of its vulnerability. It’s there in the local mythology. And then I came up with the idea of using glass. It had that sensitivity and vulnerability, a contrast with the rock. And of course you also get the reflections and the play with light, and it looks like ice. It was a win-win.’

The pavilion’s undulating walls are made up of five tons of opaque glass bricks attached to metal poles, sunk into rock, a method borrowed from local house building traditions. The two walls have two narrow openings, allowing for a kind of intimacy and exposure at the same time.

As Ikonomidis says, the experience of being in or around the pavilion is different depending on the weather or what season or time of day you are there. ‘I was actually surprised by how much it changes,' he says. ‘Even if I look at photographs now, I can categorise them by the time of day they were shot. Sometimes it appears blue, sometimes it is yellow. And when you walk around it, it can become almost transparent, from other angles very textured, sometimes it seems to absorb light and other times to reflect it.'

With a population of 100, Sarfannguit is, in Greenland terms, large and thriving. Many of the country’s smaller villages lie abandoned and in ruins. The industrialisation of fishing and the Danish Government's policy of relocating villagers to larger towns, particularly the capital Nuuk, has left Greenland littered with ghost villages. Indeed, Sarfannguit is the only active village left in the new Unesco Heritage area and there is an abandoned village nearby. Ikonomidis imagines his pavilion as a connection between the two outposts, between the past and the present. It is also intended to be a waymaker or beacon on a planned hiking trail between Sarfannguit and Nipisat, an extension to the existing Arctic Circle Trail and another way of drawing attention and visitors to the village.

Now that the Qaammat project is done, Ikonomidis is preparing to head to Tanzania. He worked in the country before moving to Greenland, developing a housing prototype that would help stop the spread of malaria. He’s going to rejoin his old team and work on bamboo housing designs, while also pursuing what he calls his ‘art/architecture projects’.

It’s hard to imagine, though, that he won’t be back in Sarfannguit, checking in on his hilltop monument to the village and the community it maintains. ‘They have been involved since the very beginning and they were there when the pallets of glass bricks arrived,’ he says. ‘They are really happy with the pavilion and that is the most valuable thing to me.' 

INFORMATION

konstantin-ik.com

The first thing you see when you arrive in Milton Keynes by train is Station Square. Framed on three sides by long reflective glass buildings, this expansive plaza and transport hub had, until recently, lacked a sense of purpose, density or softness. Yet this is about to change, as a new installation titled The Modernist Glade – part temporary public art, part architectural pavilion project, and part experimental urban renewal intervention with a nod to sustainability – promises to subvert the idea of a glade and apply it to the city's heart in the shape of an urban garden. 

‘[Station Square] is a very large, very open and also quite empty space,' says Takeshi Hayatsu, founding director of London-based Hayatsu Architects. He is one third of the team, who, alongside artist Tue Greenfort and curator and producer Aldo Rinaldi, was commissioned by Milton Keynes Council and Milton Keynes Development Corporation to revitalise this important but under-used urban space. 

The architects soon realised that the key to making Station Square a place you want to spend time in was to create a series of smaller spaces within it and dedicate each one to different activities and ideas. They subdivided the square into a grid in which they placed 48 planters containing different types of tree at regular 10m intervals, installed four pavilions designed for different activities and functions, and reorganised existing street furniture to respect the new modular layout. 

‘The idea of the grid was a reference to the radical grid the city was originally planned on back in the 1960s,’ says Hayatsu. ‘We asked ourselves how we could adapt it to the 21st century.' The answer was make nature the underlying theme – in this case trees, fungi and insects – and choose materials accordingly. ‘20th century modernism was pretty much about concrete and steel, so our Modernist Glade is full of timber, stone and recycled or natural materials.' The trees are also a nod to the utopian ideals of this ‘new’ city and the millions of trees planted upon its founding in 1967; a staggering 25 per cent of the city is now covered in trees, some 22 million in total.

The impact of this project is subtle, partly because the trees are young and starting to lose their leaves and not every element of the plan is completed or has bedded in. But early signs are promising and the intent and ambition is bold and pioneering. The main pavilion is a freestanding square structure with arresting mushroom bags hanging from the ceiling, a table resting on slim and knobbly tree branches, and a pleasing geometry to its wood architecture. The stretched canvas on the roof and walls (which can be removed to make the pavilion entirely open) bring to mind the paper used in Japanese shoji screens. The large stones that this and the other structures rest on are deceptive. They are arresting and beautiful in their own right but also anchor the structures in place with the help of hidden stainless steel dowels.

‘We see this pavilion as a laboratory where you can come together and make things,' says Greenfort, who has added a layer of ecological urgency and depth to the project, and is curating the two-year programme to activate the square. Workshops will be held on how to grow mushrooms or make baskets out of the willow harvested from the screens installed elsewhere, for example.

Two main lawns that were empty have been transformed too. Sections have been ‘rewilded’ so that the wild flowers, plants and fungi can attract bees and insects that are in steady decline. One lawn houses a timber screen and canopy for screenings, while the other will host a bee hive (the bees will enter the hive via a tactile ceramic flower with an opening where the stamens should be, also designed by Greenfort).

Eventually, fungi will fill the tree planters and cover the locally sourced log seating that is dotted around the project too. The most interesting part of a fungus is not the umbrella-shaped ‘flower’ you see above ground, explains Greenfort, but the subterranean network of roots or mycelia that allow trees and fungus to communicate and exchange nutrients and chemicals. He likens this to an underground internet, but it has also been called the plant version of mutual aid.

It’s this symbiotic relationship that The Modernist Glade hopes to celebrate over the next two years, on the one hand exploring how we can cohabit with other species and live more sustainably alongside them in the urban world, but on the other, and on a more pragmatic level, testing ways the square can become a greener, more pleasant and liveable part of the city.

INFORMATION

hayatsuarchitects.com

tuegreenfort.com

Stratford just got a new meeting place. The Pavilion at Endeavour Square has just been unveiled to a design by ACME, bringing sustainable architecture, fun design and a touch of placemaking to this part of east London. 

The London architecture studio's director Friedrich Ludewig started off designing with a seemingly blank slate site – an open and as yet undeveloped part of Stratford’s International Quarter that sits just outside the borders of the Westfield complex and next to the large bridge that takes visitors through to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the Aquatics Centre and the West Ham’s London Stadium beyond. Surrounded at the moment by construction, newly completed office towers and enough rail tracks to make a train spotter happy, the site was in need of a purpose and a focal point – something fun and engaging, welcoming, useful and strong enough to act as a landmark for its corner of this still-growing London neighbourhood.

Moulding a meeting place

Enter ACME, which immediately identified, Ludewig recalls, a set of parameters that helped the team define their design for this ‘vertical piazza'. Having worked on the Olympic Park and bridges' masterplanning some 15 years ago, the architect had a strong affinity for the area and its needs. It needed to be a building that ‘says hello from all sides', he says; one that doesn't have a flat roof, so as to enhance its views through drops and vantage points; one that has a garden that pays homage to the nearby park and the wider site's origins; and a structure that is lightweight, as it was going to be built atop a DLR tunnel and train lines. 

The first three elements helped ACME mould the building's shape – it’s an expressive volume that swells and dips, creating a number of staircases and ways in and through, terraces and stepped seating areas, as well as the undulating rooftop with its decked areas and lush native wildflower gardens. The very last parameter – weight – was crucial in defining the building’s material and construction methods. The structure is impressively made almost entirely (with the exception of its shallow concrete foundations) of wood. 

ACME’s inspiring timber structure

The Pavilion is an extremely lightweight timber structure, made using cross-laminated and glue-laminated timber panels, which carry low embodied carbon. Parametrically controlled timber fin cladding and a timber frame were designed to perfection, forming a building that has achieved a rare, ‘Outstanding’ BREEAM score of 92 per cent.

This was also aided by the fact that The Pavilion is connected to the Stratford district heating and cooling network and has external lighting especially designed to minimise light pollution. Projecting slabs and a beautiful soffit ceiling inside celebrate wood throughout – while the green spaces created at the top enhance the area's biodiversity, as they act as a food source for pollinators, and a home for bird and bat species.

A nod to Alpine landscapes

If going round the building, with its blooming meadows, rolling hills and long views, conjures up images of Alpine landscapes, you are not far off the mark. Drawing on Alpine architecture and the nearby Olympic Park's sporting references, Alpine themes helped guide the design of The Pavilion – and in particular, its interiors. The building’s two levels are occupied by Haugen, a delicatessen, brasserie and café inspired by Alpine dining, with an interior design concept created by the award-winning creative studio of Afroditi Krassa. 

The ground floor also hosts an information point for the wider area, pointing to sights such as the nearby mobile orchard display The Hothouse by Studio Weave and garden designer Tom Massey. Meanwhile, a set of water fountains and an art piece by Troika adorn the open square right in front of The Pavilion, completing this new offering in Stratford's cultural and hospitallity scene.

INFORMATION

acme.ac

This year’s London Design Festival features many little moments of calm tucked in between the installations, pavilions, launches, events and exhibitions. Perhaps the most prominent is The Cube by Velux, a collaboration between Danish architecture studio Henning Larsen and the long-standing leader in the roof window and skylight market, Velux.

The project was realised in collaboration with London studio FormRoom, with invaluable technical assistance from Bang & Olufsen – another iconic Danish design brand – to support the sound installation by Danish musician Kasper Bjørke. 

Set on the South Bank at Observation Point, The Cube is a prominent piece of temporary urban sculpture. Eva Ravnborg, partner and project director at Henning Larsen, describes how the project came about. ‘Velux had this idea that they wanted to make a pavilion at the LDF. They talked to various Scandinavian firms to find a partner who shared their values. At Henning Larsen we’re very attuned to what daylight can do for people, especially here in Scandinavia.’

The ribbed timber structure directs visitors into a faceted, mirrored interior. ‘What we wanted to create was an installation that had an abstract, artistic quality,’ says Ravnbord, ‘Something that made people think about daylight. In our buildings, we use daylight to create space, so the Velux windows become the basis for the whole design.’

Henning Larsen and Velux: choreographing daylight

Ravnbord references how daylight – and the absence of light – have shaped recent Henning Larsen projects. At the Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, an archaeological museum set into the ground, ‘the lack of daylight is a key design feature’. In London, the changing (and often unpredictable) light will create a constantly shifting interior. ‘Sunlight makes a building come alive. You can choreograph how daylight enters and different qualities of light – it gives us a wide palette of materials,’ Ravnbord explains. ‘As the windows in The Cube open and close, they have a sort of choreography, as if the building is dancing.’ 

‘The Cube boils together both the Velux brand and what we really think about when we design,’ says Henning Larsen’s design director Carsten Fischer. ‘When designing the interior, we wanted to create a Pantheon-like experience, with mirrors and shutters that multiply and change the space. From sunrise to sunset, the building will create different moments that change over the day. It’s about inviting people to spend some time in there.’

There’s also the ambient soundscape. Composed by Kasper Bjørke, it incorporates samples from nature to create an immersive soundtrack. A set of custom-designed Bang & Olufsen speakers ensure perfect playback. ‘A lot of us are now experiencing our homes in daytime a whole lot more, and seeing how daylight shapes our experience,’ says Ravnborg. ‘Our everyday lives are full of things we have to react to, so we wanted this installation to be about calmness and sound.

‘It could be placed in many locations, but we preferred it to be in a place of leisure, somewhere you can get a moment of calm in your everyday life. Why is daylight so important? In a hospital, it’s been shown that access to daylight helps healing. In schools, it helps learning. It’s just better for your mental wellbeing.’

INFORMATION

The Cube by Velux is located at Observation Point, 56 Upper Ground, London, SE1 9PP

A digital version of the experience will live at veluxcube.co.uk

henninglarsen.com

kasperbjorke.com

bang-olufsen.com

formroom.com

velux.com

Logroño is awash with architectural energy. The northern Spanish city is celebrating the launch of the newest edition of its International Architecture and Design Festival; Concéntrico 2021 has opened its doors to the public and runs until 5 September. Revealing a series of pavilions and installations across Logroño and its outskirts, the festival also includes meetings, activities and exhibitions that ‘discuss public space and places of coexistence’. Inaugurated in 2015 and operating annually ever since, the festival of the built environment is known for its creativity, and this, Concéntrico’s seventh iteration, is no exception.

Led by director and curator Javier Peña Ibáñez, the installations are designed by a range of international studios. They include Lanza Atelier, Laurent Martin, VAPAA Collective, Radu Abraham, Paradigma Ariadné, Herrmann & Coufal, SpY, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Palma + Hanghar, 44flavours, and École Supérieure de Design de Troyes. 

The pieces are located all over town, in locations ‘selected for their high landscape and ecological value’, explain the organisers. Ecology and design are key drivers in this year’s debate, while the sustainable pavilions were created on principles such as reuse and recycling; they use wood panels produced by Garnica, a renewable, recyclable, reusable and biodegradable product. Below, we tour some of the pieces on offer. 

Eclipse by SpY

Spanish studio SpY proposes a large scale dome to be created at the city’s Logroño Intermodal Station. The piece is a black, 16m-diameter sphere, located right on the station’s central oculus. ‘In the Neolithic period [an oculus] was interpreted as a symbol of the gods’ constant vigilance and attention to the actions of human beings,’ the team says. 

Arbre by Laurent Martin

France’s Laurent Martin makes a comment on the use of various materials and nature in our cities, with his piece Arbre. ‘More and more concrete, more and more bare pavements, without any planting, except for a weed that we pull up or spray with herbicide, as if it had no place on the pavement,' he says. His installation, in the shape of a tree, uses 150 disused Garnica wood panels. 

No Words Conversation by Radu Abraham

Romanian designer Radu Abraham created a piece that aims to be a key conversation starter for debates around the urban realm. Discussing relationships such as old and new, open and closed, natural and human-made, the installation sits in the beautifully preserved Plaza Muralla del Revellín. 

Support Your Local Landscape by Vivian Rotie + Pablo Saiz del Río

A Spanish-Cuban team comprising Vivian Rotie and Pablo Saiz del Río have composed an installation that hints at generic large-scale advertising signs – or iconic moments such as the Hollywood sign. The structure is made up of six modular elements that are anchored to the ground using stone.

Concéntrico Pavilion by Sauer Martins + Mauricio Mendez

This team combines backgrounds from Bolivia and Brazil, creating a flagship pavilion for Concéntrico 2021. ‘In line with the theme of the festival, the pavilion proposes a reflection on the place, the urban, the city and the specific and challenging moment we live in,’ say its authors. Simple and geometric, the large-scale structure’s powerful shapes flag up the city’s architectural celebrations. 

A Topographic-Landscape-Painted by 44flavours

This German studio explores architecture from various perspectives – that of a painter, a skater or a graffiti artist. ‘As someone who’s into painting, skateboarding and writing, you look for niches and read the surfaces of buildings. You try to define the potential of theses urban landscapes,’ say the team. Their intervention involves colour and shape on an urban scale. 

Soucoupe Populaire by École Supérieure de Design de Troyes

The École Supérieure de Design de Troyes launched a workshop for its fourth- and fifth-year students aiming to show at this festival – which resulted in a team of three design students who worked on the development of this fine piece for a period of seven months. The result, Soucoupe Populaire (Popular Dish), is designed by students Camille Le Mesre de Pas, Léo Letouzé and Justine Thomas in collaboration with the Garnica and Concéntrico teams. Made of poplar, it creates a space for meeting, resting and gathering. 

INFORMATION

The Concéntrico International Architecture and Design Festival in Logroño runs 2-5 September 2021 

concentrico.es

A white cloud hovering among the trees. A tea house wrapped in grass and charred wood. A curved line of sky-reflecting water flowing through a historic park. These are among nine new architectural pavilions dreamt up by six Japanese architects and three artists, which recently cropped up across the cityscape just ahead of the opening of the Tokyo Olympics. The temporary installations were brought to life through Pavilion Tokyo 2021, a project by Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Arts Council Tokyo and the Watari-um, a contemporary arts museum. These Japanese pavilions include work by creatives such as Terunobu Fujimori, Sou Fujimoto and SANAA. 

Describing the concept as a ‘treasure hunt’, Estuko Watari, Watari-um director and executive committee chair of Pavilion Tokyo, explains: ‘It is summer 2021, a year in which the world is changing dramatically during the pandemic. In this same year, these mysterious pavilions, which are hard to imagine existing, have appeared in the city of Tokyo.'

She adds: ‘The city has always had such memorable scenes in it. This project aims to create a new story of the city.’ Many of the pavilions – displayed until 5 September – are loosely scattered around the new Kengo Kuma-designed National Stadium, the heartbeat of the Tokyo Olympics.

Among them is Go-an, a teahouse created by architect Terunobu Fujimori. Visitors climb through a hole cut into the façade of grass and yakisugi, or charred cedar, a modern nod to the humbling nijiriguchi crawl-through door in traditional tearooms. After visitors have slipped off shoes, ladder-like stairs lead them to the top floor, complete with a washi lantern and direct views of Kuma’s wood and plant-packed stadium.

‘A tea house requires otherworldly characteristics,’ says Fujimori. ‘Once you climb up and enter through the narrow and dark crawl-in entrance, you see completely different scenery.’

Meanwhile, two floating Cloud Pavilions – one positioned among the greenery in Yoyogi Park and the other at Takanawa Gateway Station – were created by architect Sou Fujimoto.

Each is a white molecular-like formation of balloons, with three stilt-like legs, tapping into Fujimoto’s fascination with clouds: ‘It has an exterior but doesn’t have walls, yet an inner space exists. Moreover, the three-dimensional inner space is extremely complex and dynamic. Clouds cannot be realised with architecture, yet they make us feel like there is something architectural to them.'

Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA created a serene, clean-lined flow of sky-reflecting water through the traditional grounds of Hamarikyu Gardens, which is fringed with ultra-modern skyscrapers. Other highlights range from artist Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room in Shibuya (a white space slowly covered in stickers) to Makoto Aida’s two ‘castles' made from blue tarpaulin and cardboard, materials often associated in Japan with natural disaster emergencies. Together, the pavilions add up to a layer of architectural intrigue across the urban fabric, heralding the Tokyo Olympics.

INFORMATION

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With the pandemic disrupting last year's MPavilion annual plans, more than a year has passed without a new, beloved community-focused architectural structure and cultural laboratory in Melbroune's Queen Victoria Gardens. But fear not; following up on a different, but equally engaging 2020 programme of events, the commissioner, The Naomi Milgrom Foundation, has just announced the next architecture studio to create a pavilion in the park: Venice-based Francesco Magnani and Traudy Pelzel of Italian architecture practice MAP Studio. 

‘We were surprised and pleased when they invited us to come to Australia to discuss the project,' recalls Pelzel, one of the two co-founders of the Venice based practice. ‘They had seen our Asplund pavilion as part of the Vatican's display at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. We went, had several meetings and saw the previous pavilions and the site, and in the end they confirmed to us the commission. The overall mood and passion of the MPavilion's team is very exciting. It is a project that is very important for the community in Melbourne, an urban sign of the consolidated role of civic place of meeting and inspiration that sets it apart.'

The project has been a while in the making, as the MPavilion design was originally scheduled for construction in 2020. The commission was the culmination of an uplifting couple of years for the young studio (which was founded in 2010); their Vatican Pavilion in Venice indeed received wide critical acclaim and was followed by the prestigious Italian Architect Award in 2018. 

The studio, even though it has built few works outside its home country of Italy, is prolific, focusing on a sensitive approach to historical architecture, restoration and urbanism, while maintaining a sharp, contemporary approach and aesthetic. Its portfolio is varied, including from the refurbishment of 19th century greenhouses in Querini Park, Vincenza, to the outfitting of the National Museum of Musical Instruments in Rome, a new office building in Bologna, and the restoration of Carlo Scarpa’s Balboni House in Venice. 

This sensibility of urban renewal, gentle transformation and sensitive, yet fresh and confident interventions will no doubt bring an exciting twist to the much loved Australian pavilion. Current plans outline that the 2021 MPavilion will open to the public on Thursday 11 November, 2021, while its design will be revealed in advance of that, during July.

INFORMATION

map-studio.it

mpavilion.org

Mizzi Studio has completed a series of architectural kiosks within London's Royal Parks, with its latest structure unveil near Buckingham Palace. The brass tubular food and coffee kiosk is the latest in a family of fluid, nature-inspired designs that the studio's founder, Jonathan Mizzi, embarked on in 2017. With the final piece to the puzzle ticked off, and restrictions lifting in the British capital, there's no better time to go and explore. 

The kiosk near Buckingham Palace

The kiosk features a 360-degree sculptural canopy that ‘swells outwards like a tree’s crown', say the architects. Sinuous and flowing, the design takes organic shapes that feel at home in the green landscape of the parks. ‘The richness of the brass kiosk echoes Colicci’s dedication to quality food and drink and highlights our belief in the relationship between excellence in design and service – each positively reinforcing one another,' says artisan food and drinks brand Colicci director, Rob Colicci. ‘We look forward to seeing the kiosks being enjoyed by park-goers once again come the summer months, uniting families through their warmth and magnetism.'

How did the project come about?

The series began when Collici approached Mizzi Studio some five years ago, to create Serpentine Coffee House. Its completion came with the design of nine more kiosks that were meant to be installed on various locations across the Royal Parks. In October 2018, the roll out began, slowly and steadily leading up to today's culmination point – the launch of the Buckingham Gate pavilion in St James' Park, the largest in the range. 

The kiosks were created to replace a number of older, tired structures in place, and to update the visitor experience at the famous London parks. They share a similar aesthetic, while being adapted to fit each of their respective sites. 

What the architects say

Engaging with modern crafts and contemporary forms was important for the design team, but responding to the Grade I listed landscape was equally key to this high profile commission. ‘Mizzi Studio has designed each kiosk to sit sympathetically in its environment,' say the architects. ‘The freestanding kiosks are conceived as a family of individual curvaceous structures with a graceful tree-like canopy that unites their design language. The initial kiosks are clad in hand ‘steam-bent' English oak timber, developed in collaboration with British designer and maker Tom Raffield.'

INFORMATION 

mizzi.co

It was only last summer that Adjaye Associates unveiled its concept for the Cherry Groce memorial design in London's Brixton. Now, less than a year on, the important monument by David Adjaye and his team has been built and installed on site at Windrush Square, the neighbourhood in which Groce lived. 

The structure commemorates Groce, who in 1985, was shot by police in her London home at the age of 37. She was left paralyzed, and passed away less than 30 years later, as a direct result of her injuries. The memorial was commissioned by the Cherry Groce Foundation, a charity founded to support marginalised Black, Caribbean and African communities. 

Acting as an installation to honour Groce and a visual reminder of the event to all, the pavilion was also created as a place for the local community. Integrated benches provide space for passers-by to sit and children to play, while its single, strong column represents Groce's strength; and its gravity-defying, triangular canopy mirrors the community's ability to shelter and protect. Structural engineers AKT II ensured the installation is balanced to perfection. 

‘I am honoured to celebrate the unveiling of this project and the representation it brings to the black community for Brixton, London, and the UK at large,' says Adjaye. ‘It is my sincere hope that the restorative justice that is borne from the making of this pavilion can help us all learn from and be better neighbors to each other in the city that we live in.'

The memorial was unveiled on 25 April 2021 at a ribbon cutting ceremony in Windrush Square.

INFORMATION

adjaye.com

Last September, when Richard Rogers stepped down from the architectural practice that he founded more than 40 years ago, he still had one personal project underway. Now, the last building of Rogers’ long and distinguished career, the new Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste in Provence, is complete. It’s tiny, but spectacular. Vivid orange and hovering, apparently weightless, the building cantilevers out of a thickly wooded ridge too steep for planting the vines that grow in neat rows on either side.

The gallery is the latest addition to developer and hotelier Paddy McKillen’s remarkable collection of art and architecture across the Château La Coste estate – a winery and cultural destination that includes his smallest hotel, Villa La Coste (W*214). McKillen also leads The Connaught and Claridge’s, and other luxury hotels in Monaco, Los Angeles and Kyoto.

Rogers joins a roster of stellar architects who have contributed buildings to the Château La Coste project. In 2008, McKillen tasked Tadao Ando with creating a pavilion, and a reflecting pool for Louise Bourgeois’ Crouching Spider and Alexander Calder’s Small Crinkly. He followed this up with a chai de vinification (wine storehouse) from Jean Nouvel and a gallery designed by Renzo Piano, while he also shipped in Frank Gehry’s 2008 Serpentine pavilion from London.

McKillen had wanted to add a building from Rogers, a long-time friend, ever since he acquired Château La Coste. It took time for the right idea to emerge from a series of conversations, most of them involving lunch. During a weekend at the estate in 2011, McKillen, Richard and his wife Ruthie Rogers took a bike ride along the chalky track of an old Roman road that skirts the vineyards. ‘I gave Richard two things, the idea of a gallery to show drawings, and the view,’ McKillen remembers. That was when Rogers hit on the idea of creating the gallery as a single dramatic gesture, a giant cantilever that leaps off the ridge seemingly into mid-air with no visible means of support. It was the chance to realise a long-held ambition, to pay homage to the cantilevered terraces of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater that Rogers had first seen as a student at Yale in 1962.

McKillen recalls two crucial moments in the evolution of the design. The first was at Courchevel, where he and Rogers went skiing the following spring. ‘Richard took me to see a house projecting off a hillside held up by a single column. I remember him saying, “If we can’t get the gallery to work, we can always put in a column”. But it was that column that gave it all away. And that’s when I said, “It’s either 100 per cent pure, or it’s not, and if it’s not pure, better not do it at all”.’

Stephen Spence’s sketch for the pavilion. Richard Rogers’ best known early work is arguably the Centre Pompidou in Paris, completed in 1977 with Renzo Piano. In the same year, the architect founded the Richard Rogers Partnership in London, which evolved into Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) in 2007. Now the practice has 11 partners and has just launched a new office in Paris – marking Rogers’ retirement by returning, in a way, to where it all began. ‘We currently have a range of exciting new projects in progress there, in a range of typologies at a wide range of scales,’ says RSHP partner responsible for France, Stephen Barrett. ‘Prompted by Brexit and the regrettable drawing up of once permeable boundaries that it implies, we are finally taking the plunge in setting up a Paris office, all these years after the project office that Richard and Renzo established in the early 1970s. Of course, we’ve never really been away, and London and Paris are so very close, but this step is also an affirmation, an important symbol of confidence and commitment to a country and to clients we value deeply.’ 

Wright used reinforced concrete to launch a pair of terraces into space. Rogers’ cantilever is tailor-made from steel tubes. According to his engineer Bob Lang, ‘it works like a see-saw’. A pivot positioned on the edge of the ridge takes the load. The shorter, landside arm is anchored to foundations sunk into the ground by two sets of galvanised steel rods. They counterbalance the weight of the longer arm that forms the gallery, a box inside the steel frame, with a glass end wall trained on the view of the green Luberon hills like a telescope, and no support in sight.

The next conversation was at the Rogerses’ house in Chelsea, London. It’s where McKillen, Rogers and his long-term collaborator Stephen Spence decided on the exact shade of orange to paint the steel. In working out the optimum size of the gallery, they looked close to home. The volume is 5m wide, the distance between the kitchen counter and the windows of the Rogerses’ house. It is also 4m high, matching their mezzanine, and 24m long, exactly twice the width of the room.

Making buildings that touch the ground as lightly as possible has always been as much a part of Rogers’ work as his love of bold colour, and making the most of a view, from the first house he built in Cornwall as a member of Team 4 with Norman Foster, to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The new gallery has all three attributes. Equally important to Rogers is the idea of rescuing the construction process from the messy uncertainty of a building site.

Another of Stephen Spence's early sketches for the project. The Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste is part of a growing list of work in France for the office, including: Maine Montparnasse masterplan, 2019-ongoing; Gare de Lyon Daumesnil masterplan, 2014-ongoing; Bercy Charenton masterplan, 2009-ongoing; The Roads of the Future Grand Paris, 2019; One Monte Carlo, 2019; Centre de conservation du Louvre à Liévin, 2019; Terminal 1 at Saint Exupéry Airport in Lyon, 2018; Grand Paris, 2013; European Court of Human Rights, 1995

The gallery, completed with the help of local architects Demaria Architecture, was prefabricated at the Bysteel factory in Portugal, a process that began with a team slicing through heavy steel tubes at precisely the right angle, with just a chalk mark for guidance. The next step was welding the major pieces together; no easy task, given that as the metal cools, the weld shrinks. Engineering consultant Michael Hasson, who guided the fabrication for Rogers, calls the skills demanded to get the steel to behave as needed ‘a collision between art and science’. João Manuel Faria de Sousa, who led the Bysteel team, recalls: ‘We had a 100 people working on the project. You could see their enthusiasm. It was like making a sculpture.’

With the kit complete, the pieces were bolted together in the factory to make sure everything fitted. Then they were dismantled, loaded onto two lorries, and driven to Château La Coste. For the last leg of the journey, the pieces were transferred from the trucks to a tractor trailer and moved to the site along a farm track, to be assembled with little more than a spanner, a cherry picker and a set of temporary supports.

Now that it’s finished, the gallery is a powerful summation of Richard Rogers’ work, as much as a place to enjoy the landscape around it, and the temporary exhibitions it will accommodate.

INFORMATION

rsh-p.com

chateau-la-coste.com

Created as a communal, outdoors break-out space for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, as well as an architectural experiment around notions of versatility, the KAIT Plaza's minimalist pavilion has just been completed. Designed by Japanese architect Junya Ishigami, the minimalist architecture project follows on its creator's previous work for the university, the Workshop building, which completed in 2008. 

Addressing the question of how to create truly multi-tasking spaces, here, Ishigami explores versatility in terms of spatial experience rather than function. Seeking to create a ‘room' for the students to sit and relax, the architect started without a prescribed function or form in mind. Instead, he tried to imagine the different ways the structure could be used. 

The result is a low volume that feels closely connected to the ground, its roofline rising and falling with the terrain's topographical curves. Inside, a bright, white interior, as crisp and cloud-like as the exterior, is equally ‘hilly', lit by 59 square openings of varied sizes on the roof. 

The floor's ‘slopes' and ‘valleys' invite users to appropriate them in their own way. Students can sit on the ground to have their lunch; meet friends; take a nap; use it as a sheltered space to play sports on rainy days; set up temporary stalls during campus festivals; or display thesis projects during end-of-year shows. The interior is entirely column-free, making the undulating floor and ceiling slabs even more impressive. 

The minimalist pavilion structure is protected from the elements by its extensive roof, but remains visibly open, without a wall or glass pane in sight. The pavilion should express and mirror the characteristics of the existing environment, and then supplement those with architectural elements, explains Ishigami.

INFORMATION

jnyi.jp

Singapore studio ADDP Architects and Los Angeles based OWIU Design have revealed their joint winning competition entry for a pavilion, which will be the centrepiece of this year's Archifest event in Singapore this September. The two firms scooped the first prize to create a temporary flagship structure for the show, which is organised annually by the Singapore Institute of Architects; only this year, unsurprisingly, due to current events surrounding the pandemic, the Southeast Asian country's celebration of architecture and the built environment will take place in the digital realm. 

Responding to this, the winning team's concept drew on the ongoing global challenges and moulded its design to work with the format of virtual tours, ensuring the festival can still be accessible and present as ‘a platform to discuss, debate and dream about the possibilities surrounding architecture and the city of Singapore,' explain the organisers. 

‘The pavilion will test new architectural ideas for post-Covid-19 design from its total prefab construction to its spatial layout, sustainable wooden material composition, functional tectonic glass design and light manipulation,' say the designers. 

Entitled Reclaiming Connectivity, the structure features as its starting point OWIU Design Studio founding partner Amanda Gunawan’s photographic series on abstraction in the natural landscape. Blending these photographic prints on walls made of Light Emitting Surfaces glass, with spatial reflections on humanity’s innate need for connection, the design explores this yearning for togetherness that becomes even more prevalent in the current framework of international guidelines for social distancing. The designers propose creating private areas within public space as an alternative to isolation, illustrating their concept through timber, prefabricated arrangements within an open plan pavilion that offers glimpses of natural scenes. 

The pavilion, which is designed to be physically built within 48 hours using prefabrication methods and 99 per cent sustainable FSC-certified timber, is still planned to appear in its physical form next year in the Singapore City gallery; but for now, it will be available to visit virtually from 25 September 2020 through the Archifest website. 

INFORMATION

archifest.sg

addp.sg

owiu-design.com

Since it's first edition six years ago, the MPavilion has become a highly-anticipated event for the city of Melbourne and all architects, collaborators and visitors involved. An initiative of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, the pavilion is hosted in Queen Victoria Gardens and designed by a new architect each year. It is a worthy example of the benefits that architecture can have on public spaces and the urban community – Wallpaper* has keenly followed its evolution over the years, with favourite designs including Carme Pinos' dynamically unfolding timber canopy and Glenn Murcutt's light and low-slung pavilion inspired by a Balinese house.

The Naomi Milgrom Foundation has now launched a new book to chart the success of the MPavilion – bringing together stories about its social impact through images and essays by architects and writers. The MPavilion is a core part of the foundation's mission: enriching Australian cultural life by engaging new audiences with exceptional art, design and architecture and exploring the social, economic and environmental value of architecture.

Featuring contributions from each of the MPavilion architects from 2014 to 2019 – Sean Godsell, Amanda Levete, Bijoy Jain, Rem Koolhaas, David Gianotten, Carme Pinós, and Glenn Murcutt – the book also celebrates the collaborators behind the scenes and what goes into the building of an iconic city pavilion.

Essays on each pavilion by distinguished writers, including Ellie Stathaki, Wallpaper* architecture editor, explore in detail the design approach, expression and impact of the commission. The book aims to open up a broader conversation about cities, pavilions, parks and public spaces today, and their role in creating healthier places to live and work.

Reflecting on the book, Carme Pinós, founder of Estudio Carme Pinós said: ‘Architecture is a service to society; it changes people’s lives and makes society possible. That’s why I liked Naomi Milgrom’s MPavilion project— it’s social, and it’s for the citizens to use. We need to find a new language and that time has come. It’s time for free and flexible architecture.

INFORMATION

MPavilion: Encounters with Design and Architecture, published by Thames & Hudson Australia. Available from 18 August 2020

A decade ago, the Japanese architecture master Hiroshi Sambuichi started researching the unique characteristics of the endemic architecture on the small island of Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea. He was intrigued by the many old minka (the local traditional farmhouse vernacular) dwellings and the fact that they all shared many similarities that pointed towards a common understanding of what had worked architecturally on the island for generations. For instance, most homes have two gardens (one north and one south) that allow the predominantly south-north wind to cool the houses when doors and windows are left open. Sambuichi used this knowledge when he designed the striking Naoshima Hall in 2015. The oversized hip-and-gable roof has a air tunnel that utilises the same breeze to cool the 1,000 sq m hall through a clever cooling and ventilation system.

Naoshima is also home to the internationally acclaimed Setouchi Triennale. For the 2019 edition, Sambuichi turned a former post-office on the island into an exhibition of his research findings with a special focus on water, and how this once was used on a grand scale via a large area of rice paddies to cool the whole Honmura village. This took the form of a pavilion, and it has now become a permanent part of the Naoshima village. 

MORE FROM WALLPAPER* ARCHITECTS DIRECTORY 2020

Japanese businessman Soichiro Fukutake has spent the last two decades working on a series of buildings set across the Seto Inland Sea. Pictured: Naoshima Hall

Using the same title and theme as in his stunning exhibition at Cisternerne in Copenhagen in 2017, ‘The Water' uses the water from an old well in the central courtyard of the renovated post-office to create a large artificial pond that helps to cool the indoor/outdoor space. There is a large deck shaded by a large roof (both created in hinoki wood) where visitors are invited to linger and rest while experiencing the moving materials of the sun, wind and water that much of Sambuichi's work revolves around. 

At the back, the former residence of the wealthy family who ran the post-office has been left mostly untouched both because of the excellent condition of the building, but also as a reminder to the villagers and visitors alike of the unique historical architecture of this little treasure island.

We all hope our houseguests have a positive and memorable stay, but the owner of a home in the outskirts of Ghent took the concept one step further by commissioning a bespoke folly in his generous garden, just for visitors. The architects, Dries Vens and Maarten Vanbelle, who head Ghent-based Atelier Vens Vanbelle, worked closely with their client, a film producer, to create the sculptural extension. 

The quirky structure serves as part-guest house, part-screening room and part-lookout tower, folding several needs and functions into a single, smart design. The space feels at once cosy and domestic, but also mysterious, striking a rare architectural balance. 

‘The only criterion was that the guests had to remember their stay forever’, say the architects. The design team describes a walk through the addition as a ‘cinematic experience’; a fitting concept, in line with the owner's specialisation and passion. The freestanding construction, which is clad in profiled Corten steel, is built in LVL wood and was designed as a single piece of furniture, whose main living spaces are internally lined in timber.

Inside, the guest area feels like a snug log cabin or grotto, while a spiral staircase leads down to an underground, dark and moody cinema and bar room; and up to a quirky watchtower balcony that overlooks the garden and surrounding foliage.

A version of this article originally appeared in the April 2020 issue of Wallpaper* (W*253)

INFORMATION

vensvanbelle.be

The MPavilion, Melbourne's annual celebration of architecture, in the shape of a light structure erected in the city's Queen Victoria Gardens and each year designed by a different architect, has just announced its 2020 plans. In a departure from the norm, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, the organisation behind the innovative initiative, has just revealed that instead of building a new pavilion for 2020, the plan is to put the focus on the existing pavilions to enhance their role and engagement with their local communities. 

The pavilion series has seen six iterations so far: Sean Godsell's in 2014, Amanda Levete's in 2015, Bijoy Jain/Studio Mumbai's in 2016, Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten/OMA's in 2017, Carme Pinos' in 2018, and Glenn Murcutt's in 2019. So far, Levete's piece sits at Collins Street Docklands; the OMA-designed one has found a home at Monash University; while Jain's is located at Melbourne Zoo; and the project by Godsell has been modified into Melbourne’s Hellenic Museum. The relocation set for Pinós’ pavilion will also be revealed in September. 

Today's announcement also reveals that the last pavilion, 2019's Glenn Murcutt-designed structure, has been gifted to The University of Melbourne and will be relocated in the summer. ‘In commissioning the 2019 MPavilion, Naomi Milgrom was very open to a broad range of possibilities when she engaged me as the architect,' says Murcutt, Australia's only Pritzker Prize-winning architect. ‘One specific requirement was that the assembly of the pavilion should be ordered so that it could be easily disassembled and reassembled when relocated to its new site. I’m delighted with the gifting of the MPavilion to The University of Melbourne, the building will continue its journey within the campus, engaging students for years to come.'

The decision was made as a response to the current global pandemic and is designed to help support artists and designers at a time where they really need it. This will be done through a specially designed programme of events, which will be rolled out across all pavilions in their new locations. The idea is to create a series of commissions and provide a platform for exchange of ideas, debate around architecture and support both creatives and local communities in an efficient and sustainable way – while reusing the beautiful architectural pieces already available through this six-year long program.

An open call for proposals has just been launched, with funding of up to $5,000 available for each of the selected projects, responding in a variety of themes, from exploring social space, to the notions of time and collaboration.

‘In our lifetimes, there’s never been a more important moment to make the most of the resources we already have — especially architectural structures and spaces, so I’m delighted that my MPavilion 2015 will be part of this initiative,' says Levete.

INFORMATION

mpavilion.org

In an innovative and practical response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 Serpentine Pavilion designed by Johannesburg-based practice Counterspace has been extended into a two-year commission. This is the first time since the annual architecture programme was founded 20 years ago that such a move has been made. Instead, commission recipients – directed by architects Sumayya Vally, Sarah de Villiers and Amina Kaskar – will use the additional time to collaborate with the Serpentine on a series of off-site and digital research projects throughout 2020, culminating in the opening of the Pavilion in summer 2021.

Sir David Adjaye OBE, who is a Serpentine Galleries trustee and the Serpentine Pavilion advisor, said: ‘Rather than rush to execute Counterspace’s stellar design as soon as it is safe to do so, the Serpentine has accepted the slowness reshaping society today and utilised it to develop a deeper relationship with the architects’. He adds: ‘While the circumstances that have prompted this evolution are by no means easy, we believe it is an important opportunity for this Pavilion to stand as a bridge of sorts between either sides of this unfathomably significant time in history.'

Lead architect Vally also welcomes the decision. ‘We've always relied on places of gathering to come together and we miss them when they're gone. Covid-19 has brought the Pavilion themes of community and gathering sharply into focus – allowing us the opportunity to extend and deepen our engagement process over two years.'

Serpentine Pavilion 2020 designed by Counterspace. Design Render, Exterior View © Counterspace

Though specific details of the digital and off-site programming have not yet been announced, Vally hints at what to expect from the extended collaboration. ‘We are excited to launch a set of initiatives that will redefine and celebrate the role of gathering and the construction and preservation of belonging in times of crisis – reversing the original procession, so that a cascade of dialogues, events, programmes and fragments of the Pavilion will pop-up incrementally in real and digital space over the course of 2020 coming together in 2021 in Kensington Gardens to form Pavilion 20 plus 1.'

The well-timed response comes as cultural organisations around the world are adapting to the new normal. Wallpaper* has commissioned a series of longform articles from our network of international editors, who offer insight to how the cultural community in their territory is responding, with positivity and hope. You can read the World View series here.