nARCHITECTS’ Forest Pavilion – a temporary installation completed in May 2011 – served as a shaded meeting and performance space for visitors to the Da Nong Da Fu Forest and Eco-park in Hualien County, Taiwan. The project was conceived within the context of an art festival organized by Taiwan’s Forestry Bureau to raise public awareness of a new-growth forest that is being threated by development.
This circular gathering space emerges from the ground in a series of eleven green bamboo shading vaults, organized in two rings around a void. The plan is inspired by the rings of a tree, and the different forms of the vaults by growth patterns in nature. In the same way that the infinite variety of shapes in a tree derives from very simple branching rules, the configuration of vault shapes uses a single geometry, the parabolic arch, in a way that could in theory generate endless configurations.
