The Red Pavilion

The making of a temporary pavilion should be an opportunity to test new ground. When we were individually invited to participate our first instinct was to pool our resources.

Although our practices have an engaged conversation on many levels this collaborative working is new to us, but it suited the site and the brief. As the city is a collective work, so might be our pavilion.

As young practices this is by far the most explicitly public commission any of us have had to date, and so we were testing this new way of working on work of a type that was also new ground. Very early on we agreed that we would build our design conversation around the ideas of incidental public space, that our structure would seek to be a background to the life that surrounds it and fills it. A work process developed which sought at all times to engage opportunistically with the constraints proposed by the project. Using a shared territory of reference and pragmatic engagement we built the design through a 3 month long conversation about the city between our practices.

We started by thinking about the facade as a public space. The facade is the place where the relationship between the individual and the collective is made most explicit. It is not thin, but a thick space with implications for the city and the inhabitant. Windows to private quarters make the walls to public rooms. We thought of the facade as a theatrical backdrop to Cubit Square, with props to the north to hold it up. We elaborated these props to make a room, sheltered under a roof. This made us think of market halls and public rooms and we thickened the rhythm of the facade, drew it back to give order to this space.

In the space between the hall and the facade there was room to make a gallery that overlooked the square. We lined it with park-benches and a deep cill. We liked the way this might be a place to hide away while at the same time could allow people gather in small groups. It makes a soffit to the public hall. We thought about how infrastructure is the most important public space of all and decided to use heavy concrete sewer pipes to make a low verandah to the north. We liked the way these fat columns make a more domestic face to the green space beyond.

We thought of how doorways, niches and thresholds of buildings are good places to linger in and made a deep arcade between our hall and the square. We painted it red as like the phone box it is a public room in the city. Caught somewhere between furniture and infrastructure. We offer it to the people of London to make of it what they will. We hope that its temporary life might produce some lasting memories in these new spaces of King’s Cross.

The Red Pavilion
Curated by: Raymund Ryan, Nathalie Weadick, assisted by Rachel Gallagher
Program: pavilion
Architect: Clancy Moore Architects, Steve Larkin Architects, Taka Architects
Structural engeenering: Cora (John Pigott)
Contractor: John Sisk and Son Ltd.; Mathew Omalley Timber Construction
Suppliers: Jade Metal; Uniqrete
Year: 2015