MPavilion 2015 by Amanda Levete of AL_A

Amanda  Levete  is  a  Stirling  Prize  winning  architect  and  founder  and  principal  of  AL_A,  an  international award-­winning design and architecture studio. Since its formation in 2009, AL_A has refined an intuitive and strategic approach to design that has radicalised clients and briefs, led to a diverse  range  of  concepts  for  cultural,  retail  and  commercial  schemes  around  the  world.  Recent  commissions include the highly anticipated expansion of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a 1.5  million  sq  ft  luxury  shopping  mall  and  hotel  in  Bangkok  on  the  former  grounds  of  the  British  Embassy, a new centre for the cancer care charity Maggie’s, a 13­‐hectare media campus for Sky, and  a  cultural  centre  in  Lisbon  commissioned  by  Energias  De  Portugal  (EDP).

Pictured: Amanda Levete's Lord's Media Centre (1999), winner her the Stirling Prize (Britain's highest architectural accolade) while working as a partner for Future Systems.

Design statement by AL_A:

The Pavilion, rooted within the natural landscape of the Queen Victoria Gardens, has been designed to create the sensation of a forest canopy. A dematerialised structure that feels more akin to its natural surroundings than to a building, it gives shelter for a programme of events.

The canopy is made up by a number of seemingly fragile, translucent petals. The petals are supported by impossibly slender columns that gently sway in the breeze. Exploiting the temporary nature of the pavilion form, our design subverts the norms of immovable and immutable buildings. It embraces and amplifies such distinctions, so that it speaks in response to the weather, and moves with the wind rather than trying to keep it at bay.

Complexity increases through repetition, using two sizes of petals to create multiple configurations. At the centre, the petals tightly cluster and are layered to give a continuous shingled surface. As the Pavilion fades out into the parkland, the size and number of spaces increase until the trees themselves take over the Pavilion’s role and the structure dissolves.

The slender carbon fibre columns conceal the wiring of lights and speakers. A halo-like effect is created by an LED strip forming the capital to the column, while pioneering technology turns the petals themselves into amplifiers. From surrounding high-rises, the Pavilion will have a glowing aura and particular presence in the otherwise darkened garden at night.

Visitors approach from all directions, barely perceiving the distinction between tree canopy and Pavilion, aided by a smooth transition from grass to timber deck on the same level. Flowerbeds arrayed around the edge subtly define the entrances that visitors can filter in and out through.

Inside, the performance space is oriented to provide a backdrop of the jagged urban skyline to the north or the delicately layered treeline to the east. The slender columns are arranged on a 4m x 4m grid at the centre to afford a generous event space. The MPavilion is the product of an Anglo-Australian collaboration led by AL_A, working with Arup’s London and Melbourne offices, alongside MouldCam and Kane Construction.

Employing the aesthetic and technology of hi-tech nautical engineering, the 3m and 5m diameter petals, which are only 3mm thick, are formed of ultra-thin translucent composite and carbon fibre, developed with an Australian boat specialist. Each petal is formed by a carbon fibre weave, interlacing structure and aesthetic together to form the pattern that falls as shadow on the floor. Reinforcement is embedded into the surface of the borderless petal, rather than as an encircling frame.

MPavilion 2015's carbon fibre columns in focus.

Pictured: MPavilion 2015's 43 'petals'—13 with five-metre spans and 30 with three-metre spans—supported by 95 slender columns looking toward the southern end of Melbourne's central business district.

Illustrator extraordinaire Oslo Davis visited MPavilion to capture MPavilion on paper.

MPavilion 2015 at dusk.