MPavilion
Alexandra Zafiriou, Robert Buckingham (Editors)
Thames & Hudson Australia Pty Ltd, September 2020
Hardcover | 8-1/2 x 11-3/4 inches | 260 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1760760564 | 80.00 AUD
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Each year, MPavilion blooms as a unique, innovative civic space for the community to engage with and share. Complemented by an independent cultural program driven by Australian and international artists, designers, thinkers and cultural institutions, it’s an invitation to communicate, collaborate, educate and create. It is, in the words of Professor Alan Pert, Director of Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne, a ‘cultural laboratory … an educational environment beyond the institution, a museum without a collection’.
Centred around the six pavilion projects to date, by architects Sean Godsell, Amanda Levete, Bijoy Jain, Rem Koolhaas & David Gianotten, Carme Pinós and Glenn Murcutt respectively, MPavilion will reflect on the projects’ ongoing architectural and cultural impact. Incorporating architectural drawings, renders, models and design statements, as well as eight essays by leading design writers and photographs documenting each project and the activities that it inspired, this book considers how each architect responds to or highlights issues relevant to contemporary design, architecture and community building. In doing so, MPavilion positions their collective endeavour as a global model for cultural activation, design leadership, place-making, community building, architectural tourism, philanthropy and public/private partnerships. This is at once the perfect introduction to and critical assessment of the MPavilion project.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
In the middle of 2014, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation launched MPavilion, Melbourne's version of London's annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, which began in 2000 with a pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid. Every year in Melbourne an architect would be commissioned to design a temporary pavilion that would host cultural and other events in Queen Victoria Gardens. Following its four-month summer run, the structures would then be gifted to a Victoria institution where they would find a permanent home. The inaugural commission went to Australian architect Sean Godsell, who was followed by four architects from outside Australia and then, in its sixth and most recent year, the country's only Pritzker Prize winner, Glenn Murcutt. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic putting the temporary pavilions on hold (its 2020 program is being held virtually and in various locations around Melbourne), and with the six pavilions bookended by two Australian architects to give them a nice symmetry, a book devoted to MPavilion is both welcome and timely.
Subtitled Encounters with Design and Architecture, MPavilion starts with a half-dozen spreads with full-bleed b/w photographs of such encounters: an audience in rapt attention, a child designing his own MPavilion, a dancer craning backwards, a fashion show beneath the "wing" of Murcutt's cantilevered roof. Reiterated by similar spreads at the back of the book, the photos make it clear that what took place in and around the pavilions was as important as their designs. The sentiment is echoed in the foreword by Naomi Milgrom, the businesswoman who conceived MPavilion "as a collaborative cultural laboratory; a place for debate, entertainment, education, and most importantly a place to seed and exchange ideas." In turn, the more open and receptive the architecture, the more diverse and successful the events taking place within them.
Sean Godsell designed the inaugural MPavilion as a simple box with operable walls that simultaneously open up and shelter the space beneath the flat roof. One year later, British architect Amanda Levete (AL_A) installed a bunch of lightweight "petals" fitted with LEDs upon slender columns, akin to an artificial forest canopy. She was followed by Indian architect Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai), whose 2016 MPavilion was made by hand from bamboo, stone, and rope, its roof pierced by a large opening at its center. One year later, Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of Rotterdam's OMA floated a large roof over a berm that made the structural supports — at least some of them — disappear. In 2018, Barcelona's Carme Pinós designed an origami-inspired pavilion of wood and steel. And just last year Glenn Murcutt departed from his usual corrugated metal in favor of a tensile membrane stretched over a steel frame, resembling very much an airplane wing.
Each commission is documented in the book in chronological order, with a short text and numerous photographs. A few glossy spreads are inserted after every couple projects, one showing the design processes for all of the MPavilions (third and fourth spreads below), one highlighting the architectural models of the same, and one depicting the structures in their post-MPavilion "second lives." Roughly the last 40 pages give a sampling of some of the events — the "public encounters" — that took place each summer in the pavilions at Queen Victoria Gardens. Graphically, the book's many parts are unified by bright orange, which grew out of the visual identity developed by Studio Ongarato starting in 2014. For the most part, the orange is successful (when closed, as in the photo above, the book is particularly striking), but the pages with orange text on white or pink paper are headache-inducing to this 40-something reader. Luckily those texts are a rarity in this celebratory document of a project that has created some attention-getting settings for "debate, entertainment, education" and the exchange of ideas.
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