A spectacle of pavilions
A rout of schoolboys is meandering through the 2018 NGV Architecture Commission, Doubleground. Their teacher is using the setting to give impromptu career counselling on the virtues of landscape architecture as a vocation. One student scrambles up a steep incline of grass and poses against the black folded wall beyond, his unruly adolescent limbs in stark contrast with its serrated profile. “Are you part of the art, Jack?” jokes one of his friends.
It’s a more pertinent question than he realizes. In the multitude of annual programs, publications and Pinterests on pavilions, the issue of where architecture stops and art begins is a recurrent one. What is to be made of this burgeoning pavilion phenomenon? If there isn’t yet a collective noun for pavilions there probably should be. A “spectacle of pavilions” springs to mind. Or maybe a parade? And what do some of the most recent additions to the stock - Melbourne’s MPavilion by Estudio Carme Pinós and the NGV Architecture Commission by Muir and Openwork, for example - add to the field? It’s telling that with lineages of five and four years respectively, these programs are now almost the grandes dames of pavilion endeavours.
There are new kids on the block: two sound and spatial installations, 80Hz: Sound Lab by Thomas Wing-Evans in collaboration with the DX Lab at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney and Blak Box by Kevin O’Brien for Urban Theatre Projects, first installed at Barangaroo and later relocated to Blacktown, Sydney; Raffaello Rosselli Architect’s Plastic Palace at Murray Art Museum Albury, New South Wales (see page 78); and two pavilions in Lismore, New South Wales to
