Faraday Pavilion Roskilde Festival 2012
Design Concept The Faraday Pavilion, designed for Roskilde Festival 2012, is an installation that provides a place for people to rest, to meet, to eat and to socialize between concerts. The pavilion creates a space to sit on benches or to lie on the grass that is protected from the large surrounding crowds. , comprises three seating ‘poles’ which generate a larger field of approximately 30x40m, whose extents and geometry is defined by an FRP gridshell. At night, programmed lighting extends the pavilion’s usability and identity. The design draws conceptually on the investigations and theories of Michael Faraday, who pioneered the study of electricity and magnetism. His work introduced for the first time the notion of the field, and that a space that seemed physically empty in actual fact contained energy and momentum. To represent the field, Faraday
introduced the notion of lines of force, which he also believed had a real, physical manifestation. We now know that this is not true, but the conceit that it might be drives the design and geometric definition of the pavilion. The pavilion comprises of 3 positively charged ‘attactors’, which provide seating areas and located activities such as DJs within them, and a much larger field which defines a less formal area of inhabition that is protected from the the large flows of people within the site. As such, it attempts to secure a large area with very little material. While there are distinct entrances, the porosity of gridshell allows people to enter and exit the structure where they wish. During the design process, a computational model that calculated fieldlines given a set of input points was used to develop and explore
different plan configurations. The resultant 2D plan geometry becomes the target for the subsequent 3D, materially informed simulation process.