The main themes and concepts that we hope to achieve in our proposal are the following:
- Breaking away from the past, of what used to be perceived as Australia, an English colony, towards the new Australia, a multicultural country with an identity very different from England. The English past is represented through the old traditional English sandstone barrack ruins on the edge of the cliff on Cockatoo Island, which will be juxtaposed and ‘broken away’ from through adding the new 2010 layer to the island, a building that represents new technology and that ventures towards a yet unknown Australian future, as the pavilion cantilevers beyond the cliff edge, ‘breaking away’ from the traditional building by being set on a different axis
- Similar to Mies’s pavilion, this pavilion will be long, minimal and horizontal. It will attempt to requestion the traditional roles of architectural elements, such as doors and windows
- It will address poetic ideals through the use of light, water, volume, voids and solids, and planes through the main two axes, the vertical and the horizontal
- A strong recurrent theme will be that of ‘being suspended in air’; each room will attempt to address that idea and try to evoke that emotion of suspension in air and of awe through different means, so that each room has a completely different feel, and will hint at the activity that should be undergone in the space just as Mies’s spaces and use of walls do in his pavilion
