Organic Canopy Outdoor Pavilion

The natural pavilion located in Lingang, now Nanhui New City is located at the southeastern tip of the Shanghai peninsula. The concept for this idea was inspired when a major portion of the land on which the new city is sited was reclaimed from the sea — marking the largest land reclamation in history.

What began as a geological phenomenon resulted in the design of this organic pavilion.

Built for the Shanghai Art Exhibition, Naturalbuild‘s Outdoor Pavilion, commemorates and accentuates the vague geological characteristics of its site. The pavilion is made of a nylon net-like canopy sprayed with an insulation foam which strengthens and expands producing a bubble-like texture.

Designers took a more hands-on approach to the fabrication process, after suspended , the net was pre-stressed with anchored weights at scattered points of the surface then it was sprayed with the insulation foam.

This fabrication technique called “pre-distorting” on a tensile surface has multiple structural benefits.

“Firstly, as the shell structure has already been ‘pre-distorted’ by self-weight… gravity will not cause another deformation as long as the boundary conditions remain the same; moreover, the process of pre-stressing was able to lower the risk of the polyurethane foam cracking. as a result, a lightweight pre-stressed shell structure was formed,” says Naturalbuild. 

The design combines both geographic phenomena, structural technique and aesthetics to create an interactive and visually unique organic canopy and outdoor pavilion.