A few weeks ago I made a brief stop in Toronto before heading off to Paris for the upcoming workshop I was teaching with Michael Muraz through our Photography Unfolded site. In a last minute decision Michael got us tickets to “Unzipped” Toronto. The first North American stop of the BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group designed pavilion.
First, a brief history of this pavilion and its start as the Serpentine Pavilion. The Serpentine is well-known contemporary arts centre in London composed of two galleries: Serpentine Gallery and Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Since 2000 the gallery has commissioned some of the worlds most prominent architects to design a temporary summer pavilion each year. The pavilion stands for three months and has to be created on a limited budget. Its intent is to act as a multi-purpose social space for artistic events. The very first pavilion, as well as the Sackler Gallery, were designed by Zaha Hadid (one of my favorite architects!). The most recent was designed by BIG.
BIG’s “Unzipped” is the first pavilion to be making a multi-city tour with its final home becoming Vancouver. Toronto was its first stop, not sure where it’s headed next, but it’d sure be great if it graced Chicago for awhile!
Despite the gloomy weather on the day we visited, I was so happy to have the chance to see it. The pavilion is made of stacked fiberglass bricks. When looking at either side of the entrance you get this amazing curvature to the path through the pavilion, while viewing from the sides its a rectangular structure. What struck me most is the variations in tone of the light on the fiberglass, even with the dull gray skies.









Of course I need to throw in a few black and white versions…



And for a wider shot, of course that only occurred to me with my phone…