Visit of the Dance Pavilion in Geneva
Pavillon de la danse © ON architecture
The teaching unit UPCYCLING, part of the axis « Integrated Design, Architecture and Sustainability (IDEAS) », visited the Dance Pavilion in Geneva. This architectural excursion resonates with the issues addressed within the framework of this course, dedicated to the interdisciplinary design of a temporary pavilion.
The UPCYCLING teaching unit focuses on the integration of sustainability issues into architectural design, with special attention to savings in resources. Dedicated to the interdisciplinary design of a temporary pavilion, it gathers about forty EPFL students supervised by lecturers from the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST), the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID) and the Structural Xploration Lab (SXL).
The teaching unit will center around this issue of finding balance between meeting needs and saving resources, focusing on the design of a temporary architectural object. More specifically, the students will be asked to design a temporary pavilion dedicated to hosting participatory processes, integrating recycled elements, satisfying users’ comfort requirements and managing the ecological load induced by their projects.
The visit of the Dance Pavilion, designed by ON architecture of Lausanne, was conceived in this spirit. Installed in the heart of the city of Geneva, the Pavilion hosts a performance hall dedicated to contemporary dance, as well as several side-rooms. The prefabricated and movable structure, composed of 84 wooden arches, demonstrates the capacity of this renewable material to address the needs of a program with highly demanding acoustic requirements: a performance hall within an urban environment.