OFFICE 85

In 2010 Kazuo Sejima invited Piet Oudolf to design a beautiful garden at the very end of the Arsenale area of the Venice Biennale. This intervention made an until then undiscovered building visible: a former ammunition storage on the edge of the newly designed garden. The curator realized the pavilion was too interesting to leave it empty and asked us to present our work in it. The storage facilities are made out of seven separate vaulted rooms, in rather decaying conditions. We invited photographer Bas Princen and decided to make a presentation about our mutual approach and interest in the image and the perspective. The seven rooms of the storage facilities looked like the perfect context for that. What was missing was a mutual connection—like a hallway—between the different rooms, as well as a spatial device to seek for a relation with the garden/park in front of it. The intervention to resolve both issues is as simple as it is effective. A parapet, or porch made out of an elegant white steel structure covered with a reflective silver roof fabric was positioned in front of the existing building. The new structure, placed along the entire length of the house, mirrors the existing pitch roof and thereby extends the existing pavilion with a new external gallery linking the seven rooms together. Under the roof one is not really in the building, not really in the park. Inside each of the seven rooms, a juxtaposition of images of both Office and the photographer Bas Princen are presented side by side on white aluminum plates. With a simple intervention the former ammunition storage became Garden Pavilion.