Creative architecture

The BLDGBLOG (which I’m assuming stands for Building Blog) has an interesting entry on a ‘pavilion’ built of old shipping pallets, ground anchors and tie rods. According to the author:

Designed to be easily assembled and dismantled, and then entirely recycled at a later date, the resulting building is intended as a temporary meeting place.

As the architect writes, the shipping pallets are “characterized by a complex geometry of open and closed surface portions,” with the effect that a staggered stacking of each unit produces “interesting netlike structures.” They add that the deceptively curvilinear form becomes a “cave.”

The unexpected modular reuse of everyday materials is nothing new in architecture — seemingly every term in architecture school brings with it experiments in the tiling of things like cable ties, styrofoam cups, plastic water bottles, and so on — but the spatially dramatic effects of this particular experiment in large-scale, off-kilter pallet-stacking are worth seeing. In fact, a kind of micro-village of equally fluid forms built entirely from pallets would be fascinating to see.

The pavilion at night, lit from within, is also pretty eye-popping.

There’s more at the link, including more photographs.

I’m always interested to see how creative artists and designers can take the cast-off things of society and turn them into something beautiful, or useful, or both. I’m not sure how useful this pavilion would be (particularly when it rains!), but it’s certainly a novel idea to dispose of old shipping pallets. Congratulations to the designer.

Peter