The Pavilion for Performative Arts is envisaged as a vibrant center of spontaneous public gatherings that nurtures art -- a theater space for various performative arts and a cultural anchor that belongs to the community at large.
Proposed in the heart of the central park at Bhartiya City in Bengaluru, it is imagined as a space for companies, artists, performers, and storytellers to come and tell their stories. A public space, it will add cultural and recreational programs to the park. Bhartiya city is a seamless mix of the finest residential spaces, office towers, hotels, public spaces, modern schools, state-of-the-art hospitals and efficient transport links to provide a complete environment for better living. Being a performative arts pavilion, the performance of the building was the most important aspect to consider while designing. The technology was to stage the performances worldwide. It needed to be flexible and adapt to the nights and days, change of seasons and different moods.
Design Approach
The design is a sensitive landscape integration, and a general concept approach that would provide meaning to it all. The pavilion is planned with various spaces include a stage, a backstage with loading dock, green room and wings, a seating area, and a sound and a lighting control booth enclosed in one shell.
The entrance is shaded with the highest point of the roof structure and has a timber deck for people to gather. The deck greets the users and extends inside making a link between the outer envelope and the inner space. Visitors enter the shell at the ground level, which gradually slopes down with leveled terraces for rows of seating towards the stage.
Morphology
The majority of the building sits into the ground such that the massive volumetry of a theater is dissolved into the landscape. The theatre is flanked with landscape on three sides to decompose the scale and thus the relation to the building keeps changing from every side. The roof is designed as a sculptural form with folded planes emerging out of the existing landscape of the park. The folded plates also temper the acoustics in the space.
Materials
The roof is clad in metal that reflects the sky and the landscape around it. The building merges within the surroundings while the roof gives it an identity of its own.
The folded plate roof is built using copper and bronze so visitors can see a colour transition from gold to orange to brown and teal as the seasons progress. It provides an illusion of change. The shell is made in moulded concrete which ensures high performance in technical and structural terms. The interior walls and ceiling of the shell are sculpted to naturally project acoustics toward the audience.
The pavilion will be an icon that represents the values and ethics of Bhartiya City as well as have its own identity.
Principal Architect – Akshat Bhatt
Design Team – Akshat Bhatt, Heena Bhargava
Visualization – Pankaj Kumar