Spotlight: Serie - "London BMW Group Pavilion"

The British have a particular fondness for the Victorian bandstand. Not much more than a lightweight roof supported on slender columns the idea of the bandstand is to get close to nature by stripping back the architecture to a minimum. There is no role for exotic form and shape-making: the architecture's beauty comes not from itself but rather from its open attitude to its natural surroundings.

With the Victorian bandstand as a point of departure, the BMW Group Pavilion seeks a similar relationship to its setting. In practice, this has involved addressing questions of spectacle and presence, of the relationship to BMW's product and service offering, and of sustainability.

One of the pavilion's functions is to display BMW's new fleet of electric and hybrid vehicles. These vehicles use carbon fibre bodywork with fluid soft curves. The geometry of the pavilion roofs manifests a similar calm and rationale attitude to geometry through the use of off-phase sinusoidal curves set out in symmetrical arrangement. The dynamism of this form is a function of the immediate associations: wave forms, fluid dynamics, air flow all incorporate similar patterns. What is important here is that this form is an abstraction of these associations. The geometry does not imitate or in any sense look like something else: it is therefore best understood as the idea of fluidity.

London BMW Group Pavilion Project Page | Serie