Midden Garden Pavilion

The project forms part of a larger renovation to a freestanding villa located high up on the slopes of the Vlakkenberg in Cape Town, South Africa.

The clients required a pavilion within their extensive and beautiful garden, from which to appreciate the natural landscape around them.

The pavilion attempts to address a complex question: how to create a meaningful dialogue with place when the surroundings are both de-natured and powerfully “natured”. This requires that the relationship between architecture, nature and modernity is carefully considered. The building is intended to be of nature: to contain a distillation of landscape which then allows it to be naturally contained by its surroundings. Metropolis limited their consideration to the timeless, the simple, to charting the movement of the sun, the changing quality of light during the day, the mystery and magic of the landscape at night. To stillness, emptiness, possibility. The intention is to say as much as possible with as little as possible and to leave as much as possible unsaid…

The Midden Garden Pavilion, Cape Town, South Africa
Program: pavilion
Architects: Metropolis
Structural engineering: Sutherland & Associates
Quantity surveyor: Shevel and Simpson
Contractor: Batir Construction
Completion: 2014