Pavilion: The Latest Architecture and News

Photographer Patricia Parinejad shared with us some photos of the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale designed by Dominique Perrault Architecture. You can see more images after the break.

Photographer Patricia Parinejad shared with us this photographs of the Russian Pavilion designed by nps tchoban voss for the Venice Biennale. Check them all after the break.

Uros Novakovic and Renato Pucci, students of the Università di Firenze in Florence, Italy shared with us their temporary pavilion for the Italian national rail-transport company. You can see more images and architect’s description after the break.

Based on the idea of Mirage, described at the wikipedia as a naturally occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky, the team that designed the Croatian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale decided to create a floating pavilion to present arts and architecture of Croatia at the Venice Biennale.

Following the same principles of a Fata Morgana, which is an unusual and very complex form of Mirage that can be seen in a narrow band right above the horizon, the Floating Pavilion is constructed on an existing barge with dimensions of 10m x 20m x 3m. It is designed by a group of 14 leading Croatian architects, who have made the recent Croatian architecture visible on the global scene. Instead of working in the usual formats of their practices and presenting speculative projects, they decided to work together on a single proposal and to have it constructed and towed toward its final destination in Venice right away. The pavilion structure is the barge’ cargo, welded from 30 tons of Q385 wire mesh in more than 40 layers of varying contours. The cargo presented here maps the process of intense interaction between architects working on the common project, their collaboration with the Croatian maritime industry, and the extraordinary act of architecture it produced. Please follow the pavilion’s maiden voyage across the Adriatic over here

Based in Berlin, Plastique Fantastique experiments with public architectural works to create unique spatial experiences right in the middle of a city. These giant plastic bubble installations which take on different shapes in different cities, immediately snatch people’s attention and create a temporary focal point in the city centers.

More about the bubbles after the break.

Here’s another great time lapse video from Seppe, this time walking us through the German Pavilion in Shanghai designed by Schmidhuber + Kaindl GmbH (more Shanghai coverage here). Entitled Balancity, the pavilion is designed by Lennart Wiechell and at 6,000 m2, it is the country’s largest structure at any exposition. The building’s geometric mass was conceived as a three dimensional sculpture and the form wraps certain spaces which showcase different aspects of Germany. As you can see in the video, the pavilion includes a central energy source, a factory-like section, an opera and cultural section, and even a park. The areas show Germany’s technological progressions and products meant to help solve urbanization problems, and visitors slowly glide past certain installations on moving walkways. Unlike other countries’ pavilions that seem to work off of one cohesive theme, the German pavilion seems much more “busy” – it is a conglomeration of many different ideas and products with lots to see at each turning corner. What do you think of Balancity?

Check out other videos Seppe has shared with us like his British Pavilion time lapse or his Denmark Pavilion video. Full list of credits after the break.

Presidio Habitats is a site-based art exhibition celebrating the wild Presidio. It began with an invitation to an international group of artists, architects, and designers to submit a proposal for a temporary habitat sculpture serving a Presidio “animal client.”

For those of us not able to experience the Shanghai 2010 Expo in person, we hope these great photos by IODICEARCHITETTI of the Italian Pavilion will help convey the spirit of the project.

Check out more photographs after the break.

Built in memory of Ernst Koller, a businessman and inventor, BBK‘s pavilion is a multipurpose space open to the educational community for meetings, workshops and exhibitions. The pavilion, in the spirit of Koller, will serve as a creative center where students on the Basel University campus can come together to brainstorm and design.

More about the pavilion after the break.

As the previous pavilions we have featured on AD for the World Expo 2010 illustrate, the exhibition is, undoubtedly, a giant testing ground to experiment with the latest avant-garde design concepts. In late March, we featured Naço Architectures‘ pavilion and we have just be informed of some details of the facade treatment. The facade’s main focus was to capitalize on Monaco’s seemingly eternal presence of sun and sea. Designed so visitors will experience different lighting effects, the pavilion’s prominent water screen casts its reflections on and around the pavilion’s façade, “to symbolize a country surrounded by sea and sunshine and attached to respect its environment.”

More images and more about the facade after the break.

The event series “Germany and China – Moving Ahead Together” presents itself in spectacular fashion during its sixth and last station: the Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Designed by Markus Heinsdorff, the “German-Chinese House” is not only the architectural highlight of its Expo presence; it is also a forward-looking example for the use of natural construction material. It is the only two-storey building at the Expo whose load-bearing structures are made of bamboo. The building is an artistic encounter with the theme of sustainable urbanisation, which was the focus of the three-year event series from 2007 to 2010.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

It seems that this week everything is about Shanghai. The World Expo 2010 starts in three days and the pavilions are ready. Yesterday, we featured some amazing photos that Chaz Hutton took at the Expo. Today, David Goss shared with us many more, and even a video inside the UK’s Pavilion. Check them out after the break!

Flickr Video

Only four days left to the grand opening and the pavilions of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 should be ready to receive thousands of visitors each day. We’ve been featuring a lot of pavilions but there is still a lot to cover, so we hope to bring you more on the Expo in the next few days (like a good preview of many pavilions ready later today). Meanwhile, check some of our latest ones, after the break.

Dutch Pavilion for Shanghai World Expo 2010 The Dutch submission to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai is an exceptional one. This time around, it will not be the classic pavilion with long lines of visitors waiting outside and a presentation inside. The Netherlands is making its appearance at China’s world exposition along an entire street. The submission, entitled “Happy Street”, is the response by designer John Kormeling to the Chinese Expo theme “Better City, Better Life” and the sub-themes (read more…)

Expo 2010 Shanghai is the first World Fair to adopt sustainable urban development as its theme. As consequence concepts which legitimise the extensive resource use and major investment of a World Fair must be promoted. The basic concept of “Norway Powered by Nature”, designed by Helen & Hard, directly engages this challenge, placing emphasis and awareness on multiple aspects of sustainability.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

There’s only one week left for the grand opening of Shanghai’s World Expo 2010, and as you may know, we’ve been featuring many pavilion’s (all the pavilions here). One of the first ones was the Brazilian Pavilion designed by Fernando Brandão Arquitetura e Design.

With more than 80 comments, it became one of the most controversial and discussed pavilions. At Fernando Brandão they followed the discussion and now they wanted to show you the complete project. More images, drawings and the architect’s description after the break.

The Dutch submission to the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai is an exceptional one. This time around, it will not be the classic pavilion with long lines of visitors waiting outside and a presentation inside. The Netherlands is making its appearance at China’s world exposition along an entire street. The submission, entitled “Happy Street”, is the response by designer John Kormeling to the Chinese Expo theme “Better City, Better Life” and the sub-themes:

- Urban cultural diversity - Urban economic growth and prosperity - Innovation in science and technology in urban contexts - Remodelling urban communities - Interaction between urban and rural areas.

Find out more about Holland’s pavilion right here. More images and a video after the break.

MVRDV shared with us their design of The Water Cube, a pavilion for the World Expo 2012 in Yeosu, Korea. The theme of the Expo is “The Living Ocean and Coast”. You can see more proposals for the thematic pavilion by Ginseng Chicken, PTA, and Nicoletti Associati.

More images and architect’s description after the break.