BIG Serpentine Pavilion
San Jose, CA
A temporary San Jose urban landscape welcomes BIG’s Serpentine Pavilion for a one year residency. The pavilion design is an exercise in geometry in which a line becomes space. Taking inspiration, curves become landscape around the pavilion. The resulting dunescape, constructed using skate park techniques, situates the pavilion and delineates outdoor rooms of different scales. The dynamic lofted surfaces provide space for soil depth atop an existing asphalt parking lot, allowing clusters of trees to provide shade and enclosure.
The trees will remain in boxes beneath the dunescape surface and will be donated as street trees for the City of San Jose after the exhibition closes. A striped graphic ground, part painted mural and part vegetation, stretches across the blacktop, cooling by solar reflection. The bands ascend the dunes amplifying their contours. A social and cultural space within the city, the pop up pavilion landscape will host informal gatherings as well as larger scheduled performance events and educational opportunities.
Client: Westbank
Design Team:
Elysian Landscapes
BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group)
GKW Architects