It’s been almost a decade since the first MPavilion—Sean Godsell’s unfolding steel shed—opened in Queen Victoria Gardens in Naarm (Melbourne) on the unceded lands of the Bunurong, Boonwurrung, and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation. As the program’s tenth season wraps up this week, and with speculation growing over the future of Tadao Ando’s interlocking concrete forms, there’s an opportunity to reflect on the architecture of MPavilion as a recurring project.
An annual architectural commission for a meeting and event space, MPavilion was established by Naomi Milgrom and The Naomi Milgrom Foundation with additional funding from the City of Melbourne and support from a range of project partners. The initiative, which opened across the road from the NGV International a year after Milgrom’s departure from its Board of Trustees, is more-or-less a direct uptake of the Serpentine Pavilion format for London’s Hyde Park. Nine structures have appeared on the site so far, with each remaining open for around four or five months across the city’s warmer months before being permanently relocated to other sites across the city.
Alex Brown is an architect and senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Monash Art, Design and Architecture. Her research explores twentieth-century and contemporary art-architecture relationships, architecture exhibitions, and architecture and radicality from the 1960s onwards.
Memo Architecture is supported by the Department of Architecture at MADA, Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.
