TAINAN PAVILION | ARCHQUID ​architecture think-act tank

This pavilion is located in the limits of the campus of the NCKU in the city of Tainan. It emerged as part of an exercise to analyze the idea of ​​what a pavilion is and represents for architecture. The studies and material processes of this exercise are part of an investigation related to the evocation of an organic origin of the material through curved geometries.

By observing the immediate context we detected that there was a need for a space to allow moments of rest, relaxation, observation and reflection. There is a particular emphasis on the lighting characteristics in the night landscape and can be considered as a beacon for its atmospheric capabilities and the special views from Xiaodong Avenue.

The conception of the project is crucial from the material expression and the visual effects during the day and during the night. We hope it attracts and invites people to stay in a context where there are not too many stimuli. It is intended that the torsion and sinuosity, and the search to find a balance, establish a dialogue with an interior landscape that does not offer major sensory challenges or surprises.

The pavilion covers an area of ​​24 square meters with an elevation of 3 meters. Its two bodies are formed by successive layers of plywood. From the material point of view, this wood was used without aggregates, so that its raw characteristics can be appreciated and it can expose its own expressive capacity.

As for the layers, different degrees of separation were considered as part of a search for lighting effects and different degrees of visibility both from inside and outside. These distances were achieved by placing separators, also made of wood, which were giving a particular pattern and light shades to the envelope.

The context, in the broad terms as we understand it, also plays a significant role in our design process by revealing geometric and functional latencies. These suggest, to a greater or lesser extent, the possibilities of dialogue with the new entity that begins to articulate with the existing space. The fragmentations proposed by the conformation of the layers offer a particular and curiously revealed view of the realities of the environment.

We consider that achieving specific atmospheres through materiality and its formal capacities is a challenge that reveals the true intentions of the design of a space from its autonomy. This pavilion can easily be reconfigured by repositioning its levels of repetition and variation. Each position implies the revelation of a particular state of its matter that originates new images associated with light and its consequences.

This space can be disarmed and resurface again under other conditions within its own and multiple possibilities. And this can be repeated until the exhaustion of the resistant qualities of its materials.

We continually analyze the pavilion as an ideal subject for architecture to express itself without prejudice, and exercise various issues with a degree of freedom difficult to find in other programs. Its scale encourages the exploration of ideas that often transcend the possibilities of its size and functions.

We understand the pavilion as an object that breaks into the architectural scene, producing a contrast and opening certain questions. That establishes a dichotomy between its relative small scale and the relatively large one of traditional and solid architecture.

Shaping a given set of materials-that is, building-can be a futile exercise to simulate capturing an elusive time. This is one of the signs of the eternity will of architecture. The pavilion, as a design challenge, is inserted into this problem of duration, with its own nuances and with its own temporary disquisitions.

No doubt it provides a more agile response, a more precise portrait of the spirit of time. This is because of its relative speed of design and construction. It also has to do with the idea of ​​not knowing how long it will remain in a place, since it is a structure without a clear duration. This affects our perception of the project and our overall experience.

Architecture projects often have development processes that extend for years; this can produce a conceptual distance between the initial time and the moment when its construction ends.

We also understand it as a testing ground, not only of new materials, or new combinations of known materials, but of composition and relation of concepts. We see it, even, as an excuse to reflect from new angles on the experience of spatial and aesthetic qualities. And to contemplate how tectonics and material used on a small scale can, in some cases, subvert deeply held notions that, often due to some kind of lassitude, continue to prevail in architecture.

At a time when there is talk of the invisibility of information and networks of different kinds, and in general of the ungraspable nature of flows, real space appears with the vivid force that only "analogue" material can give.

The experience of the body in space is not overcome by any technological instance or by any flow of information, and even if they manage to alter it, they can not annul it.