Interaction of Color: Shift Transforms Tschumi’s Transparent Tunnel Into a Polychromatic Pavilion

Pantone may put its trend-spotting authority behind a single color every year, but this summer, it seems that one hue is not enough — for architects and their pavilions, at least. So far in 2015, we’ve reported on Pneuhaus’ tricolored RGBubble in Rhode Island, followed by Selgascano’s Serpentine Pavilion, a multi-chromatic cave of ETFE plastic in the heart of London. Now, as if to continue this vibrant trend, Rotterdam-based Shift A+U have created a new installation wrapped in rainbow hues in Groningen, Netherlands.

The CMY Pavilion is actually a temporary makeover of a 25-year-old structure by Bernard Tschumi, a perfectly transparent, inclined box built for Groningen’s citywide exhibition “What a Wonderful World.” Of the five pavilions designed for the 1990 festival, the ones designed by Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, and Coop Himmelb(l)au have since been dismantled; pavilions by Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas remain intact, and the former’s pavilion design has served as a space for rotating art projects and performances for some two decades now.

© René de Wit

Bernard Tschumi’s glass pavilion, before and after Shift A+U’s colorful adaptation.

For its intervention, Shift A+U has wrapped the glazed box in broad, chevron-like stripes of translucent film; the zigzagging patten of three colors — cyan, yellow, and magenta — results in a psychedelic tunnel of myriad hues. As with Pneuhaus’ RGBubble, the installation harnesses the properties of “virtual” colors to create a surreal experience that literally changes how inhabitants see the world outside.

This connection to the digital realm echoes the original purpose of Tschumi’s pavilion, whose “instable façades” formed reflective projection screens for music videos shown during the city’s art festival. With the introduction of intense color to the structure, Shift A+U offers the public a chance to experience this piece of avant-garde architecture in an entirely new way while preserving its original spirit of instability and transience.

Shift’s radical adaptation of this iconic pavilion will remain on show until September this year.