Pavilion Let’s Play! / DREAM.Archi

A sensory experience. In the exceptional setting of the gardens of the Villa Medici, the pavilion puts the 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 presence to the material and inviting you to touch it. At the end of the path, the central area, like 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 sports. Punctuated by basketball nets at different heights, and 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 will host 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 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 optimizing cutting of 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.