Dramatic Yet Serene

Every year Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens hosts a free five-month design festival. Not unlike the Serpentine Pavilion in London, each year (minus 2020, for obvious reasons) a different architect is commissioned to design a pavilion for the event. The next MPavilion — number 10 — is the first project in Australia for world-famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

The client, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, describes Ando’s design as a “dramatic and serene space.” His signature use of geometry and precise exposed concrete surfaces “respond to the surrounding park.” The design features a large canopy — an aluminum-clad disc resting on a central concrete column — and two offset squares creating the entrances. Concrete walls enclose the space to create like a sanctuary. 

Long horizontal openings running the lengths of the north and south walls frame views of Melbourne. The plinth is half paved, half reflecting pool, mirroring the canopy, sky, and city. Ando wants his “architecture of emptiness” to let in “light and breeze to breathe life into it.”

The master from Osaka is the seventh architect to have his first work in Australia commissioned by MPavilion. At the end of the season, the pavilion is “gifted to the people of Victoria” and relocated to a new, permanent home. How this would be done with a poured-in-place concrete building, however, was not disclosed.

Over ten years, the program has commissioned and built pavilions by Rachaporn Choochuey, Francesco Magnani and Traudy Pelzel, Glenn Murcutt, Carme Pinós, Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, Bijoy Jain, Amanda Levete, and Sean Godsell. Godsell, designer of the inaugural MPavilion in 2014, will act as executive architect for Ando's MPavilion 10.