“Performance Pavilion”
Academic Work, Fall 2014 Design Studio
The class was tasked with designing a performance pavilion to be placed in Kickapoo State Recreation Area, Vermilion County, Illinois, USA. After numerous site visits and hiking around the terrain, the shift in grade and scaling of stones and water left me feeling as if I had participated in an action sporting event. With this new understanding of the site, I began to focus on the concept of action sports that use terrain change in competition. With snowboarding and skateboarding in mind, the manipulation of architectural massing and sloped, extruding surfaces began to take shape. Through abstraction, I used monolithic pillars to lift the roof and expose the volume underneath. In the main performance space I pulled inspiration from Cirque du Soleil and how the performers crawl around and traverse unorthodox spaces. Through repetition I arrayed the grid of monolithic columns and lowered some to create a stadium like seating arrangement at human scale, blurring the lines between function, aesthetics and structure.
