genus: nation gender status
_Assembly Hall Garden Pavilion
_American University of Beirut
_Lebanon _Summer - Winter 2016 _ongoing _Commissioned by the AUB President's Club
_Architecture by GHAITH&JAD
_Graphic Design by Cesiumatom
On the occasion of its 150th year, a pavilion is constructed to commemorate defining moments in the course of AUB’ s history of inclusion. A medley of images and statistical information portray the diversity within the university’ s student body and the constantly amplifying struggle to include all who wish to learn.
_THE PAVILION
A pavilion is an experience.
It is a flexible architectural open space that invites people to come and spend time in it.
It is a temporary structure, the function of which could potentially change.
The pavilion site integrates the exhibition within the campus grounds, with the intention of making it porous and part of the daily walk. The pavilion is a sweeping white ribbon of tin shaped by the existing nature of the Assembly Hall Garden. By visually cropping the two oldest structures at AUB, the pavilion highlights the architectural history of the campus with a contemporary assertiveness, while maintaining a perpetual organic flow of visitor circulation.
The exhibition becomes a fragment of space that allows the playful daylight to shape its presence and content by day, and a sequence of subtle luminosities to bend in its wake by night. The concave spaces of different scales create an experience of varying levels of intimacy. Tangents that extrude between different semi-circular geometries tie the spaces to one another. The viewer moves through these alternating spaces, constantly exposed to the content on the one hand, and the campus on the other. The pavilion understands time through its own physical fragments, embodying time' s continuous framework within its historical context. The gesture has neither a beginning nor an end. It has neither a front nor a back. It is as continuous as time.
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