Firm： Park + Associates

Type： Commercial › Exhibition Center Pop-Up

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2019

SIZE： 10,000 sqft - 25,000 sqft

BUDGET： Undisclosed

The pavilion sits in an outdoor plaza in Chidlom, in a busy shopping district in Bangkok. Taking into consideration the conference’s theme of blurring boundaries between online and offline platforms, the concept of “boundlessness” was conceived. Instead of attempting to compete with its bustling urban context, the pavilion subtly draws attention to itself using layers of translucent fiberglass mesh.

Typically used for industrial purposes, this material was adopted in the façade’s design to act as physical representation of the conference’s core idea. The fiberglass mesh, which hangs down freely from a ten-meter height, is arranged in increasingly shortened lengths as one delves into the internal space. Together with the mesh’s lightweight qualities, this results in an ephemeral effect as the layers are constantly shifting and never static. This approach blurs the boundaries between the constantly enclosed main conference hall space and its context. At night, lighting is used to accentuate the space whilst completely changing the ambience, an important part of the installation as this in turn defines and animates the activities inside.

The pavilion’s design stemmed from a brief of creating a lightweight structure that could be easily assembled and dissembled within a short time frame. The internal space is divided into three zones – the main exhibition space, a conference hall that can accommodate an audience capacity of 600, and its café. Instead of creating a fixed space per function, all three areas are expandable, depending on the required function and capacity at any one time.

As the pavilion was never designed to be permanent, the designers looked to how the fiberglass mesh could serve more than a one-time use or purposefully reused, this time with a longer lifespan. After being taken down, the two-kilometer-long span of mesh was repurposed to produce more than 1,000 reusable tote bags.