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Client: Beijing Olympic Park Administration Committee
Type: Park Pavilion
Size / Date: 5,000 SF / 2013
Awards: Winner, The Fifth China International Architectural Biennial Competition



The Outdoor Room is a park pavilion that reactivates Beijing’s iconic Olympic Park while also focusing on air quality issues in Beijing. After the Olympic Games, the park was transformed into a vast space for temporary fairs, expositions, and performances. The scale of the park requires a pavilion that engages visitors without being overwhelmed by the immense scale of the surroundings. The pavilion creates a truly public space separate from all of the fairs and expositions.


“Outdoor Room” has been designed with the parallel concepts of a “city in the room” and conversely, the “room in the city.” These concepts have produced a semi-enclosed “Outdoor Room” that is incorporated into the park while also remaining autonomous. Inside the “room in the city,” large furniture elements organize public events—from outdoor performances to reading to lounging. The “city in the room” presents the subtly changing qualities of the Olympic Park from within the pavilion.


Outdoor Room is a park pavilion as well as a barometer of Beijing’s well-documented air quality levels. On most days, pollution creates a dense fog that transforms the city with an unsettling palette of colors. On the occasional day of better air quality, urban forms suddenly materialize “out of the fog.” The concept of a city that disappears and reappears was central to the public experience of Outdoor Room. Inside the pavilion, a large elliptical roof opening provides a visual measure of the air quality. On days of good visibility, the roof void frames clear views of the Olympic Observation Tower and beyond to the National Stadium. On days of poor air quality, the landmarks virtually disappear from sight.

External Links:
Touring the Cities of Olympics Past (BBC)
Inside Beijing's airpocalypse (Guardian)
Olympic Stadium With a Design to Remember (NY Times)

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The glossy translucent fabric panels both reflect and transmit the color hue of the polluted air enveloping the city—from blue to grey to yellow. The torque geometry of the fabric panels reflected the colors differently, especially when viewed from different vantage points within Outdoor Room. The uncanny experience of a city disappearing and reappearing comes into focus from within Outdoor Room while also creating a new public space in the Olympic Park.





Press:
Landscape World, Online (August 2015)
World Architecture News, Online (November 2013)
The Architect's Newspaper, Online (November 2013)
Project Team: Phu Hoang, Rachely Rotem, Amanda Morgan, Xinran Ma, Yuri Jeong, Hugo Santibanez, Demar Jones, Emanuel Admassu, Chad Murphy
Credits: Arup (Structural, Design), Beijing Institute Of Architectural Design (Structural, Local), Matthew Niederhauser (Photography)