Build it, they will come —

Spectacular architectural pavilions are big crowd-pleasers, but critics claim they’re running out of control.

Temporary architectural pavilions are spawning with increasing frequency and flamboyance around the world. In the past few months alone we’ve seen an origami-like structure engulf the statue of the Holy Roman Emperor in Munich, then disappear. Another, conjured in Los Angles as a kind of towering funnel attempts to harness the ephemeral energy of lightening. Earlier, in Harbin, China, the world’s tallest ice pavilion was built in the shape of a flamenco dress. Happily, it’s since thawed.

“What’s interesting is how much the typology has exploded,” says University of Queensland professor John Macarthur, co-author of the book, Pavilion Propositions. “When London’s Serpentine Gallery launched its summer pavilion program in 2000 with an installation by Zaha Hadid it marked the revival of an almost forgotten form. By 2010 there were something like 45 temporary pavilions happening around the world and in 2015 there were, by our calculation, 170!” Since then they have multiplied almost promiscuously.

Hadid’s pavilion was intended as “a structure, a marquee, a tent” recalls former director of the Serpentine, Julia Peyton-jones; a one-night party venue for the gallery’s 30th birthday celebrations. But so successful was it, so ‘wow’ the factor, that the minister of culture in the New Labour government agreed to extend its run, turning it into a de facto temple to Cool Britannia – and setting in train a phenomenon critics reckon is now veering out of control.

Over the past 18 years the Serpentine summer program has seen temporary structures by illuminati including Oscar Niemeyer, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel occupy the elegantly groomed grounds of Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, and Central London. The 2016 iteration by Danish It-boy architect Bjarke Ingels, unidentifiable lying objects of no fixed function but with a lot of pizazz, clocked up close to two million visitors. Last year, the Serpentine gallery successfully exported its pavilion franchise to Beijing, with a steel beam and cable construction by JIAKUN Architects outside WF Central, a shopping and hotel complex in the Dongcheng District. It lived for four months, and was then disassembled.

“We have enormous affection for things that are temporary,” says Sydney architect Camilla Block, of Durbach Block Jaggers. She’s quoting environmental artist Jeanne-claude – who with her late-husband Christo – spent some 60 years dramatically wrapping major architectural structures like the Reichstag in Berlin and the Point Neuf bridge, Paris, in lengths of fabric and rope. (Their plan to wrap the Sydney Opera House never eventuated, although they did shroud two kilometres of the rocky shoreline of Little Bay in some 93,000 square metres of erosion-control fabric and 56 kilometres of polypropylene rope, back in 1969.)

“As architects, we’re used to dealing with the idea of longevity, so doing something that is meant to be ephemeral seems quite scary,” admits Camilla, who has designed the