Two winning designs selected in the 2020 City of Dreams Pavilion Competition

The 10th annual City of Dreams Pavilion Competition has announced the verdict, and not one but two winning designs have been chosen this year: The Pneuma by Los Angeles-based designers Ying Qi Chen and Ryan Somerville as well as Repose Pavilion by Brooklyn-based architect and educator Parsa Khalili.

The jury reasoned that both entries had responded to the competition brief most creatively, envisioning a temporary gathering place while also considering the environmental impact of their designs and the full life-cycle of their materials. Both designs were selected from a field of five finalists that were unveiled in January.

"The Pneuma by Ying Qi Chen and Ryan Somerville acknowledges that, in the world of construction, efficiency hinges on two factors: weight-to-volume ratio and scalability," explains the project description. "The Pneuma pivots away from traditional methods of building with rigid and massive materials, opting instead to use air. Although air is frequently explored as a building medium, there has yet to be a standardized mode of construction with it. In response, The Pneuma uses a finite set of mass-produced materials and typical assembly details to create an infinite set of formal expressions. Using recycled exercise balls, cradle-to-cradle fabric, and rented scaffolding, the designers will create a series of amorphous geometries that range from canopies to seating elements. The taut fabric registers nuanced air pressure changes in the inflated balls, generating an unlimited array of forms with a limited set of modules."

"Repose Pavilion by Parsa Khalili explores the angle of repose as both a natural phenomenon determined by the unique properties of a granular material but also as a semiotic device that serves as an important metaphor for the current environmental crisis. Repose Pavilion seeks to operationalize this sensed instability and derive an architectural language that informs, directs, and challenges architectural notions of tectonics, structure, and construction. The project’s conceptual basis stems from our society’s shift from a stable ecology to an unstable one, from solidity to fragmentation, from stasis to imbalance, from the natural to the man-made. Repose Pavilion represents this shift, instrumentalizes it as a concept, and creates an experience that compels visitors to contemplate where architecture and people will go next. The pyramid, one of civilization’s oldest formal products, is a symbol of balance and power. Through its doubling, inversion, and stacking, it produces an uncanny artifact, an architecture of perceived instability."

FROM   Bustler