1.Abstract
Invited by the Villa Medici in Rome for the first edition of the Festival des Cabanes (festival of huts), architectural practice DREAM has designed a wooden pavilion, conceived as a sensory, playful and sporting experience.
The Pavilion let’s play! will be presented for the first time in the Villa’s gardens in Rome, from 25 May to 2 October 2022, and will then be exhibited in the Grand Parc des Docks de Saint-Ouen from Spring 2023, as a prelude to, and during, the Paris 2024 Games.
2. The Pavilion
A sensory experience
In the exceptional setting of the gardens of the Villa Medici, the pavilion puts wood to the fore in this sensory experience that remains as close to nature as possible. Amidst the maritime pines, the pavilion evokes a nascent forest. Its spiral shape guides the visitor along the open palisade, revealing fragments of the surrounding landscape between the gaps in the wooden poles. Gradually, the palisades are superimposed and become denser, the boundary between exterior and interior blurring, while the succession of poles produces a kinetic effect that seems to make the pavilion vibrate. Inside the structure, the smell of wood manifests itself, giving a presence to the material and inviting you to touch it. At the end of the path, the central area, as an open window to the sky, gives way to natural light which, as the day progresses, draws shadows that pick out the structure. As night falls, the pavilion lights up to become a sculptural lantern, appearing to float through the vast gardens plunged into darkness.
A space for games, sports and artistic performance
The Pavilion let’s play! is a place for games and sport. Punctuated by basketball nets at different heights, and by football nets, the central space invites the young and old to play. The regulatory format of sports pitches is left behind to create a rounded, sculptural enclosure, a playful space encouraging its liberal and creative appropriation by its users. The pavilion hosted artistic performances during the Nuit des Cabanes event on 25 June 2022.
Wood: an agile material
DREAM’s material of choice, wood is pushed to its limits here. The double curve of the upper ribbon is a technical challenge: it undulates both vertically, following the different heights of the poles, and horizontally, following the spiral shape of the structure. A technical feat that reveals the agility of the material, and seems to make the wood dance like a fabric ribbon.
An ecological design
The pavilion is the fruit of a collaboration between architects, engineers and manufacturers from the French wood industry. It is made of 44m3 of French pine, whose environmental properties make it possible to store the equivalent of 40 tonnes of CO2.
A mobile pavilion, it was designed to be fully dismantled and reassembled. Its parametric design allowed for the automatic numbering of the 316 poles for efficient assembly, as well as optimising cutting the CLT floor and the poles, enabling a 20% saving in materials and the reuse of off-cuts from the wooden poles for the pavilion’s furnishings.
Team:
Design and execution: DREAM
Manufacture and execution: Lifteam
Production: Association Rêve
Assembly: DREAM and Lifteam
DREAM team: Daniele Bobbio, Juliette Bonnamy, Emmanuelle Echassoux, Nils Gallon, Dimitri Roussel, Giovanni Salvador, Benedetta Vittozzi.
Lifteam team: Loïc de Bel Air, Lionel Demay, Guillaume Vanheule.
In partnership with Piveteau, Groupe CBS-Lifteam, Rothoblaas
Materials used:
Structure: poles in solid pine and 3-ply panels in French pine/spruce
Floor: French pine CLT
Furnishings: poles in solid pine and 3-ply panels in French pine/spruce
Basketball nets: steel
