The last 15 years have witnessed a global explosion of temporary pavilions sponsored by cultural institutions to host a variety of events. While bridging between site-specific installations and architectural follies, the purpose of these structures remains unclear. The Rooms: No Vacancy research projects seeks to address the question of whether the architecture of a pavilion can start, ignite, or boost a successful celebration though a typological and technological approach.
Rooms: No Vacancy recuperates the tradition of the New York party scene where celebrations are never activated by spectacular architecture but rather by the audience’s interaction with different technologies. The project, which sits in the fields of temporary architecture, architectural installations and festival architecture, explores atmospheric technologies (light, sound, music) and scopic technologies (drugs, alcohol, sex) and provides a catalogue of off-the-shelf devices and architectural strategies to keep the event going.
Rooms: No Vacancy was one of six finalists in the 2014 Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1. It was featured in the homonymous exhibition at MoMA in July 2014. It was exhibited as More Rooms in the exhibition Chatter: Architecture Talks Back at the Art Institute in Chicago (AIC) in 2015 and its now part of the permanent collection of the AIC. A mock-up at 1:1 scale of its rooms was built for the exhibition ‘Occupied’ at RMIT Design HUB in 2016.
