Dirigible Pavilion

Exhibition pavilion (competition entry, 1995)

This short-listed competition entry for the design of a Canadian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale was exhibited at the 1996 architecture Biennale. This project required hybrid analog/digital techniques to conceive and represent a form that was unachievable at that time with the digital tools available to the authors.

The Pavilion is guided by ropes along the canals. A light source in its interior illuminates large scale photographs printed in its skin. At dawn the pavilion assumes its second persona as it is brought to rest for the day in a large piazza. By day, only the drawings on the pavilion’s surface are visible. By night the color landscape images dominate, obscuring the drawings. The skin consists of two scrims, the outer one with architectural drawings screened onto the surface and the inner one printed with photographic transparencies. Hardware on the outer skin provide points of attachment for rigging. A soundtrack was composed, performed and mixed by the project authors and a cassette was furnished with the competition entry

Related links

Catalog des Concours Canadiens

Type: Architectural design;