“Why Is This Thing Here?”: A Look At The Around Pavilion

Freddy Avis

Mark Applebaum

6 August 2015

“Why Is This Thing Here?”: A Look At The Around Pavilion

At first sight, the Around Pavilion disrupts the scenic nostalgia and pleasant isolation of the Rosenborg Castle Gardens. The circular wooden structure, designed by Danish architects Mikkel Kjærgård Christiansen and Jesper Kort Andersen, is a playful and impressive juxtaposition against the surrounding park and rustic, 17^th-century Rosenborg Castle. While its bright parallel wooden planks and sleek minimalism seems jarringly contrary to the park’s homey atmosphere, the structure ultimately suits the park’s recreational mission statement, providing a unique space that reconciles old with new, alienation with transparency, and isolation with connectedness.

            On one hand, the Pavilion’s loud minimalism challenges the traditional and lavish architecture of the Rosenborg Castle, the Pavilion’s neighbor. Wood planks are the Pavilion’s sole ingredients, arranged in near-perfect circularity and vertical parallelism, contrasting the castle’s complicated multi-material Renaissance architecture. The brightness of the Pavilion’s wood also shines against the looming teal-greyness of the tall castle. On the other hand, the Pavilion’s material minimalism exhibits a certain respect for the park’s history and aesthetic. Technically speaking, the Pavilion could have been constructed during the 17^th century, requiring only wood planks and a keen understanding of geometry. When observed closely, the wood is raw and unpolished, smelling like a sawdust-drenched house halfway under construction. In this sense, the Pavilion is not a celebration of contemporary design implanted into a traditional setting for mere iconoclasm. It properly acknowledges the past through its mechanical rawness and material restraint, paying homage to the surrounding nature-oriented, unindustrialized aesthetic.

            Using both location and design, Christiansen and Andersen use the Pavilion to form a dialogue between alienation and invitation, opacity and transparency. The Pavilion begs to stand out, to be noticed as an autonomous work. Its bright distinctiveness beckons intrigue, attention, and, for lack of a better phrase, a sort of “this is neat, but what is it doing here?” The planks, likes blinds, block off any view to the Pavilion’s inner circular grass clearing when viewed at certain angles. At other angles, however, the spaces between wooden planks give view to the other side of the structure, creating transparency between outside and inside, and essentially inviting the patron to enter the inner clearing. Moreover, no direct entrance exists to the center of the Pavilion in that patrons must take a circumferential aisle that eventually leads to an entry point into the clearing.

In this pseudo-labyrinthine structure, children can explore and run through the wooden aisle or play games on the grass, and it comes as no surprise that occasionally the space hosts concerts, theatre, and storytelling events. But in the absence of accessories or other people, the clearing’s minimalism allows for powerful isolation, in which friends can have intimate conversations or one person can simply gaze upward through the Pavilion’s circular opening and daydream. Thus arises the classic balance between solitude and community, and which of these public space means to serve. Functionally and aesthetically, Christiansen and Andersen seemed to have served both.