🏛️ Pavilion — Fantasy Architecture
Temporary dreams built for real weather
🧠 UX Interpretation: Prototype as spectacle
Pavilions test ideas the world might not be ready for. They are small enough to risk failure and large enough to attract a crowd. Each one is a model of its moment — a temporary manifesto built from steel, plywood, and ambition. What Expo architecture and Serpentine commissions share with UX is that both are designed to vanish once their point is made.
A pavilion is the purest form of interface: it introduces, demonstrates, then dissolves.
🎯 Theme: Impermanence
Good UX borrows from the pavilion’s rhythm. You build something that looks complete but is always a draft. It lives just long enough for people to walk through, react, and teach you how to make the next one. Permanence is not the goal — iteration is.
💡 UX Takeaways
- Design in public: invite people to test before it hardens.
- Every prototype should offer delight, not just data.
- Short lifespans make honesty easier; learn fast and dismantle.
- Architecture and software both need exits as well as entrances.
- Archive the failures — they become the next blueprint.
📎 Footnote
From the Crystal Palace of 1851 to the Serpentine Pavilion series, temporary architecture has served as a collective thought experiment. The most enduring structures often began as seasonal experiments that refused to fade quietly.