A colourful intervention by Shift architecture urbanism transforms Bernard Tschumi’s glass pavilion in Groningen into a spatial experience modulated by layered colours.

Originally conceived as a video display space for the 1990s architecture festival ‘What a wonderful world!’, Bernard Tschumi’s transparent pavilion has since served artists for site-specific installations. To celebrate it’s 25th anniversary, the Rotterdam-based architects at Shift were invited to temporarily turn the structure into an alluring experience. Shift principal and architect Thijs van Bijsterveldt explains: ‘As architects, we were interested in interacting with the pavilion itself by interrogating Bernard Tschumi’s original concept. Tschumi chose glass for its reflective quality, creating “instable facades” that would reflect the video images endlessly. We wanted to reinterpret this idea.’

In order to recreate the original instability conceived by Tschumi, colours now replace videos. The structure is completely wrapped with bands of cyan, magenta and yellow, overlapping and alternating to create blue, green and red hues. Thanks to translucent films applied to the façade’s clear glass panels, a three dimensional colour space arises in front of spectator’s eyes and mutates while they freely circulate through the building. ‘Taking advantage of the pavilion’s situation on a busy traffic junction, our intervention was conceived considering movement in and around it,’ says van Bijsterveldt. ‘Instead of using the glass envelope to mix videos, the CMY pavilion uses the glass to mix colors.’

The CMY pavilion will remain tinted in hues of cyan, magenta and yellow until September 2015.

Design: Shift A+U
Photography: René de Wit

via Frameweb