spiral wooden pavilion invites visitors to a sensory and playful experience

Pavilion Let’s play! by DREAM

‘Pavilion Let’s play!’ is a wooden structure that invites visitors to a sensory and playful experience. Nestled amidst the maritime pines in the Villa’s gardens in Rome, the structure will be open to the public till 2 October 2022. Designed by architectural practice DREAM, the pavilion takes shape as a series of tree trunks arranged in a spiral formation. Its helical shape guides the visitor along the open palisade, revealing fragments of the lush surrounding between the gaps of the wooden poles, thus bringing them closer to nature.
image ©DREAM

transforming into a sculptural lantern

Invited by the Villa Medici in Rome for the first edition of the Festival des Cabanes, architectural practice DREAM has designed ‘Pavilion let’s play!’. The design team sought to create a sensory experience that poses wood as the protagonist of the project. The resulting composition resembles a nascent forest. The palisades are superimposed and become denser gradually, blurring the boundary between exterior and interior. At the same time, the succession of poles produces a kinetic effect that seems to make the pavilion vibrate.

Upon visitors enter the structure, the scent of wood manifests itself, attracting them to touch the pieces. At the end of the path, the central area opens towards the sky and gives way to natural light, which draws shadows that pick out the structure as the day progresses. As night falls, the pavilion lights up and transforms into a sculptural lantern, appearing to float through the vast gardens plunged into darkness.
image ©Daniele Molajoli

A space for games, sports and artistic performance

The Pavilion let’s play! is conceived as a place for games and sport. Some tree trunks are punctuated by basketball hoops at different heights or goalposts, inviting the young and old to interact and have fun. Its final shape goes beyond the regular format of sports pitches, proposing a sculptural space that encourages its liberal and creative appropriation by its users. Meanwhile, the pavilion will host artistic performances during the Nuit des Cabanes event on 25 June 2022.

The protagonist of this project is undoubtedly the wood. 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.
image ©M3 Studio

An ecological design

The pavilion is made of 44m3 of French pine, whose environmental properties make it possible to store the equivalent of 40 tonnes of CO2. The design team wanted to design a mobile pavilion that could be fully dismantled and reassembled. Its parametric design allowed for the automatic numbering of the 316 poles for efficient assembly and 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.

image ©DREAM

image ©Daniele Molajoli

image ©DREAM

image ©DREAM

image ©DREAM

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©Daniele Molajoli

image ©M3 Studio

project info:

name: Pavilion Let’s play!
designer: DREAM

location: Villa’s gardens in Rome

dates: till 2 October 2022

choreography: Wang Ramirez | @wangramirez

It will then be exhibited in the Grand Parc des Docks de Saint-Ouen from Spring 2023 as a prelude to and during the Paris 2024 Games.

designboom has received this project from our ‘DIY submissions‘ feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. See more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: christina petridou | designboom