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Design Miami/ 2015 : The Unbuilt pavilion

Miami – This year’s entrance pavilion to Design Miami/ explores the hidden process that goes into making a final design.

The winning design was selected from a school-wide competition at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design
32 teams entered, and the final design was selected by a panel of faculty staff members

Unbuilt Pavilion by Harvard Graduate School of Design, Miami

Unbuilt Pavilion by Nicolas Lee at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Miami

Unbuilt Pavilion by Mary Miller at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Miami

The entrance pavilion to Design Miami/ traditionally goes to a rising star of the design world – Daniel Arsham’s Snarkitecture and David Adjaye have both had the honour in recent years. This year’s pavilion, UNBUILT, is a notable break from tradition, however, being a group effort by several unknown students from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD).

‘What is left unbuilt is often as interesting as what is finally built,’ explains Design Miami/ executive director Rodman Primack, and Harvard’s GSD students tackle this through a constellation of pink architectural structures that have been CNC milled out of hard foam. The pastel colour palette reflects Miami’s Art Deco heritage, while the individual models are a range of experimental projects from the GSD community – many of which will never be realised, as the name suggests.

The GSD team describe the pavilion as ‘a living repository wherein the invisible knowledge within unrealised designs becomes collected, catalogued and mapped… redefining the unbuilt not as a remnant of the past, but as a continuous present’.

The Big Picture

Radical transparency and traceability are changing the way that we consume, and there is more interest than ever in the processes that go into a final product.