Inside Melbourne’s new MPavilion, designed by Rem Koolhaas firm OMA, and why the architect is all for movable structures
The latest in an annual series of event spaces erected in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens, OMA’s cross-cultural MPavilion is based on the openness of an amphitheatre – but is unlike any amphitheatre ever seen before
Architect Rem Koolhaas is bursting with big ideas. He is the brains behind Beijing’s landmark CCTV Headquarters, Moscow’s 50,000 sq ft Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the dramatic Seattle Central Library and several other eye-catching projects around the world.
But despite the scale of Koolhaas’ ideas, he does not limit himself to designing oversized buildings. He regularly works with his Rotterdam studio, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the Netherlands, on pint-sized projects including boutiques, galleries and even the sets for Prada’s fashion shows.
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At only 3,885 sq ft, OMA’s latest project, an “MPavilion”, is firmly on the smaller end of the scale. It is the fourth MPavilion – event and performance spaces which are erected for four months of every year in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens – to have been created, and is the studio’s first building in Australia.
MPavilion is an initiative from the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, a charity founded by Australian cultural philanthropist Milgrom that is dedicated to supporting design, architecture and cultural projects around the world.
“We call the MPavilion a cultural laboratory,” Milgrom explains. “From the beginning, I wanted it to be a utopian space where people can talk, perform, hear music or do anything else they want that was not connected to a larger enterprise or institution.”
At the opening event, Koolhaas was keen to emphasise that MPavilion is open to all. “We consider this pavilion a tool,” he said, “a tool for citizens to use and to be together in different configurations.”
With this spirit of openness at the heart of the project, OMA decided to base its design around an amphitheatre. But OMA’s MPavilion is unlike any other amphitheatre.