Project 4 : Pavilion of Vision

Project 4 involved the design of a publicly accessible ‘Pavilion of Vision’ to be located at the edge of a man-made lake on the University’s North Campus. This pavilion would either replace or be immediately adjacent to an existing ‘folly.’ This ‘folly,’ which includes a concrete platform and the re-use of marble columns from an early twentieth century neo-classical bank, was chosen because its ‘picturesque’ composition prescribes a way of viewing the world, a topic central to discussions in the studio throughout the semester. The primary space of this pavilion was to present, through the experience of a physically constructed space, the visual/ spatial experience which each student had developed in the first two projects.

The pavilion was intended to be a permanent construction with an interior climate-controlled space which would meet all of the requirements of life safety, energy, and accessibility codes. The brief was based on the limited program elements which might be found in a non-denominational chapel, an intentionally simple program to organize, since pedagogical intent of this project was to extend the students ability to explore the potential of their visual/spatial constructions. The primary goal of the design of the ‘Pavilion of Vision’ was to explore how the perceptual experience developed in their first projects could be made manifest in a three-dimensional habitable space, albeit one with a rather limited program.