Samson Tiew from Melbourne-based practice One Design Office (ODO) has designed a pop-up pavilion that will be installed in Melbourne’s Southbank.
The pavilion will be used to display the shortlisted entries from a design competition being run by developer Beulah International, which envisions an integrated mixed-use concept for a prominent site the corner of Southbank Boulevard and City Road. The project could include retail, a hotel, residential, commercial and cultural uses, and public spaces.
Tiew said the pavilion “utilizes concentric frames to capture how iterative progress can be seen as a sculptural outcome where visual interest is formed through the static capture of motion.”
He said that the pavilion is “designed to represent the city being in a state of constant motion and change.”
The pavilion’s frames will be lit by programmable lights, which are intended to emphasize the movement inherent in the arrangement of the frames.
The teams involved in the design competition include some of the world’s most highly lauded and influential architects, such as 2000 Pritzker Prize laureate Rem Koolhaas of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who was named one of 100 Most Influential People by Time in 2016, and Chinese architect Ma Yansong (of Mad Architects), who was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2014.
Adelene Teh, executive director of Beulah International, who commissioned the pavilion, said, “The mid-stage interim presentation was held at the Suspended Studio in the Melbourne School of Design building at University of Melbourne and many of the architects were in awe of the design of the room.”
“We struggled to find a location for the final presentation that captured the essence of what Southbank by Beulah is so we created from the ground up something that is art within itself but serves a purpose within the context of design.”
The competing teams are:
- Bjarke Ingels Group with Fender Katsalidis Architects
- Coop Himmelblau with Architectus
- Mad Architects with Elenberg Fraser
- MVRDV with Woods Bagot
- Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) with Conrad Gargett
- UN Studio with Cox Architecture
The pavilion will be installed at Queensbridge Square, in front of the Red Stair Amphitheatre in Southbank from 25 July, and will exhibit the designs following the Future Cities Symposium on July 27 to August 1.
