Northeast Pavilion

Project Name: Northeast Pavilion
Authors: atArchitecture

CITATION

Pavilions are designed to showcase. They represent a skill, a region, an aspiration, an issue and sometimes, a material. Temporary by nature, the architecture of a pavilion must represent the potential of the idea, which is being foregrounded. The Northeast Pavilion – a lightweight bamboo structure designed to showcase regional ambitions and material aptitude distils multiple ideas into one single, eloquent structure.

Open and transparent, the pavilion acts as a frame – an armature for ideas to be showcased. By itself, it leverages the potential of bamboo, a material with regional significance, to act as the structure, the shelter and the space. By pushing the envelope of possibilities with the material, the designers enable a doubly-curved roof stabilised by the virtue of the geometry and possible in very few materials other than bamboo. The geometry becomes the resilient component of the structure.

Thus, three distinct ideas collapse into the architecture of the pavilion. The seeming lightness of bamboo is employed for a labyrinth that creates visual density that is simultaneously permeable and visually dense. The organisational logic of the pavilion hinges on the material, but, in contrast, the material does not dictate the pavilion. Rather, bamboo is employed to make a singular, clear gesture of space.

Pavilions, often employed in contemporary cultural landscapes to present and represent ideas, hold a promise of pushing the boundaries owing to their temporality and the limits placed on their functional obligations. However, through the act of recontextualising a regional material, the designers present a clear, poetic and articulate work that resists the template of material-driven projects in an act of interpretation, and therefore, the Northeast Pavilion by atArchitecture is awarded a Citation for The Merit List.