Summer Pavilion ASRM 2011, Frankfurt / Competition - First prize
The Pavilion is conceived as a “patch” (pflaster) in urban fabric. Urban fabric woven out of the streets,buildings, rivers,parks and forests, represents the medium for the patch in space and time. Direction of dominant flow of people, who move along the river is treated like one abstract fiber of urban fabric to “patch”.
Program is knitted, woven, and bundled into a bush-pavilion, which serves broader context in a way that it is a pflaster in Frankfurts Grün Gurtel (green belt of forests and parks around the city). Green belt is interrupted in the area of the site of new European Central Bank, whose project anticipates new green areas on the waterfront. Until the time when the project is complete, green pavilion is announcing the upcoming change represents a patch in time and patch in the Green belt.
Design process is driven by textile conditions of the continuous flow of fibers which by intersecting each others in various manners, patch a spatial momentum in the program loop. Use of textile principles in combination with the evolving use of plastics and composites enables creation of flexible structural systems...fast to assemble and fast to move. Sewing a summer pavilion on the waterfront is a manifesto of an architecture on the move, a response to the dynamic changes in the cites, economy, society, environment.
I imagine the emergence of series of temporary architectural objects growing and patching on the city like ivy plants grow on the walls of an old building...It is also ecology, not only in a literally when talking about good and bad materials, carbon footprints, saving energy, it is also about saving, using and reusing space and time...
