Designed, fabricated and assembled by Brennan Buck’s students at Yale, the ‘Assembly One’ pavilion is the younger, more carefree sister to Yale’s building project – the 40-year old tradition in which first-year students design and build a house. The structure, fabricated entirely by 14 students in the school shop, is the information center for New Haven’s summer International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Solid and massive from one angle, lightweight and almost entirely porous from another, the pavilion alternately hides and reveals its contents.

The structure is a single triangulated pattern extruded to a point near the festival stage; every aluminum panel is aligned to that single point in space.

From that point, the structure dissolves, becoming almost completely porous.

On the interior, the extruded structure focuses views toward the festival stage.

Over 1000 panels create shifting effects of reflection and color as visitors move around the pavilion, creating less of a timeless image of shelter than an unstable, engaging heart of the festival.

The Festival Pavilion was designed and built by: David Bench, Zac Heaps, Jacqueline Ho, Eric Zahn (project founders) Jacqueline Ho, Amy Mielke (project managers) John Taylor Bachman, Nicholas Hunt, Seema Kairam, John Lacy, Veer Nanavatty (design & fabrication), Rob Bundy, Raven Hardison, Matt Hettler (design)

Assistant: Teoman Ayas Consultant: Matthew Clark of Arup

Photos by Chris Morgan Photography