PULP PAVILION
Indio, CA USA
2015
Challenges: sustainability; unusual material; temporary structure
Pulp Pavilion is a 1,300-square-foot sustainable art installation we created for the iconic Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. We devised an innovative construction system that applied paper pulp to a rope structure to create this sinuous art installation. The result was a widely popular multi-stage viewing platform and shaded gathering space that became a destination in and of itself.
Historically inapplicable to architectural structures and widely considered to be solely disposable, we identified that paper actually exhibits unique sculptural capabilities when recycled into pulp. To create the pavilion, we leveraged a production process where a blend of pulp, water, and pigment was sprayed onto a three dimensionally woven lattice of natural rope, hardening into a rigid, self-supporting matrix that is much lighter than materials of comparable strength. Our success in leveraging chemical-free paper pulp meant that the installation could be recycled or composted once the two-week festival concluded.
Given the newness of the material, it was essential that we develop a rigorous and substantial evaluation protocol. With no known construction precedents, we spent five years implementing experimental testing programs of assembled composite elements to determine the material limits within a built structure. We gathered empirical results from small-scale experiments and extrapolated them into design criteria for the final form and from this were able to predict the behavior of the structure under anticipated loads.
After the festival we ran further analysis on the structure, which led us to conclude that as a construction system it holds tremendous potential for temporary buildings in terms of lifecycle, costs, availability of materials, structural efficiency, and aesthetics.
