Today the MPavilion 2015 opens in Melbourne, Australia, during Melbourne Festival. This years design was created by Amanda Levete, architect at 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 dematerialized structure that feels more akin to its natural surroundings than to a building, it gives shelter for a program of events.

Dissolving structure

The canopy is made up by a number of seemingly fragile, translucent petals. The petals are supported by slender columns that gently sway in the breeze. Exploiting the temporary nature of the pavilion form, the 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.

Employing the aesthetic and technology of high-tech nautical engineering, the three meter and five meter diameter petals are formed of ultra-thin translucent composite and carbon fiber, developed with an Australian boat specialist. Each petal is formed by a carbon fiber 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.

Complexity increases through repetition, using two sizes of petals to create multiple configurations. At the center, 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.

Four meter grid

The slender carbon fiber 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 has 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 tree line to the east. The slender columns are arranged on a four meter grid at the center to afford a generous event space.

AL_A design and architecture studio

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.

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.