Teatro del Mondo: Experimenting Through Pavilions

Teatro del Mondo: Experimenting Through Pavilions

By Rachel M. Gamble

Pavilion architecture has an importance for architects that is often overlooked, in my opinion. A pavilion is a structure that is temporary, built quickly to display the items inside and intended to last for only a short amount of time. This impermanence, however, can perhaps be beneficial for architects: it liberates them to be looser with their design – to design structures that can be less practical and more experimental than professional architecture. Permanent architecture has to be designed with durability in mind. However, an architect is not just a designer of concrete things, but also a thinker and a dreamer. Perhaps pavilions can serve as an architect's creative outlet. 

From this point of view, the pavilion typology of architecture is advantageous because it allows architects like Aldo Rossi to test out their imaginative ideas without worrying if the structure will last. The pavilion is, in a way, the architect’s first draft – the trial and error phase of an idea. Pavilions are temporary, but fascinating because they allow us to get a glimpse of the architect's mind. This can be clearly seen in Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, in which the Italian architect was able to experiment freely with his visionary theories since the structure was a provisional one. Pavilions are often designed to showcase their contents, and Rossi's floating pavilion theater showcases the imaginative theories of Rossi for us to study.

Pavilions talk about the ideas of their designers, long after they are gone. This can be said for Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, designed for the Venice Biennale in 1979 and later deconstructed. It was a temporary building created to float down the Grand Canal on a barge. To me, a pavilion is something we can observe, and through observation see how the architect was experimenting and expressing new ideas. Visually, the Teatro del Mondo appeared very simple. The theater was composed of severely simple geometries: a single octagonal tower over a rectangular prism. Its rigid geometries made it seem elementary and basic. It lacked ornamentation and was painted in primary colors. The material and construction technique was a simple wooden one, to further its unadorned and simple appearance. 

Looking closer, however, we can see the imaginative ideas that Rossi was testing out in the seemingly simple Teatro del Mondo. Rossi believed that the buildings should be timeless, and thus he gave the floating theater rigid symmetry and pure geometry. Rossi had an interest in architectural archetypes – the forms that belonged to all eras. The basic geometries that he gave his theater are unchanging and span across the centuries of architectural history. Thus, the floating theater fit within its Venetian urban context and the tradition of architecture that existed there, because it was composed of universal shapes that exist in all decades and places. This is perhaps what makes it a "Teatro del Mondo" - a pavilion that belongs to all eras and places. It speaks of the ideas Rossi presented in his book, The Architecture of the City: "We may look at modern cities without enthusiasm, but if we could only see with the eye of the archaeologist of Mycenae, we would find behind the facades and fragments of architecture the figures of the oldest heroes of our culture." Rossi believed that primary architectural shapes withstand the rest of time, and can be found everywhere in architecture.

The pavilion’s volumetric massing is like a reduction and abstraction of the Venetian architecture around it. In the theater, Rossi was testing whether he could reduce and purify architectural geometries to produce a modern pavilion that could be a part of the historic city fabric of Venice, due to its timelessness. All of these features make the pavilion like an exhibit in itself – something that communicates Aldo Rossi’s ideas to us. Architects need not be only designers, but can be thinkers as well. In the pavilion, Rossi ventured out with his ideas. The pavilion was temporary, yet, as we can see in this floating theater, Rossi's ideas of architectural timelessness come across. These are concepts that can be applicable to future architecture. Through pavilions, architects can learn lessons, and pass on these lessons to future designers long after the pavilion is gone.

Blending in with the geometry behind it

Simple volumetric massing

Architectural timelessness

Works Cited

Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984. Print.