Pavilions for New Architecture presented the creative practices of a dynamic group of contemporary architects who had emerged on the architectural scene over the previous decade. The exhibition took architecture as its central subject, employing the form of the pavilion to exhibit architecture, as well as to study the architecture of exhibition.

For the exhibition, MUMA commissioned a series of prototypes for pavilions at 1:3 scale—offering the gallery as a spatial field in which the talents of a distinctive group of practices were provided the chance to explore an ideal architecture. Taking the pavilion as its subject, and as a lens through which to view the practice of architecture, Pavilions for New Architecture offered a significant opportunity for the open expression of architecture at a scale that was at once playful and provocative, speculative and rhetorical.

Visitors to the exhibition experienced a variety of experimental architectures: a honeycombed cube inhabited by the shadow of a sphere; an uncanny cabinet with a brightly lit interior reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey; a sculptural crown featuring a pole-dancer motif and a speculative imagining of the fourth dimension via cast shadows … to name just a few examples of the projects that were exhibited.

The architectural form of the pavilion is itself dynamic, and characterised by speculation, fantasy and mobility, an ornament of stately estates and a staple curiosity of the grand expositions of the nineteenth century. Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, 1929, is renowned as an icon of modernist design. More recently, the Serpentine Gallery, London, used the form of the pavilion to exhibit leading international architecture, with a program of annual commissions from architects such as Niemeyer, Ito, Liebskind and Hadid. In the visual arts, artists such as Dan Graham and Jorge Pardo have elaborated the pavilion as a building type in which the relationships between art and architecture, perception and exposition, critique and spectacle, are at the forefront.

The participating architectural practices were largely working in Melbourne, and were linked as a group by new models of collaboration and support, most particularly as a result of their engagement with emerging technologies, information economies and media-scapes, and local/global questions around urbanism. Pavilions for New Architecture stepped outside of the specific contingencies of client, site, economy and utility, to offer a signature design opportunity to an outstanding group of contemporary architectural practices.

^{Image: BKK Architects, Prototype 5 2005. Photo: Andrew Curtis}