The People’s Pavilion 2021
Project
The People’s Pavilion 2021
Client
Beyond The Box Project
Location
East London
Awards
Thornton Education Trust - Winner
Structure Awards 2023 - Shortlisted
The People’s Pavilion is an award winning project, receiving the 2021 Inspire Future Generations Award from the Thornton Education Trust, which was awarded during an evening at the Architectural Association and was shortlisted for a Structure Award in 2023.
The Research
The inaugural People’s Pavilion tested a bold new approach to co-design. We began by commissioning a team of young East Londoners as creative researchers, each were given a brief to discover what it means for young people to take up space in their city, exploring what access young Londoners have to culture, and what barriers they face when trying to access cultural activities. The researcher’s findings were captured in a series of short films, podcasts, surveys, street interviews, and cultural asset maps. We used the insights from the research to inform our design brief and to design our Cultural Producer Masterclass Series.
The Competition
In the Summer of 2020, we launched the People’s Pavilion design competition which sought to discover the young, diverse placemakers of tomorrow, flipping the script on who gets to design and curate cultural spaces.
It invited young people from across East London, to design concepts for London’s first space designed and curated solely by young people. The space they were invited to design was a Pavilion to be built on London’s Here East Campus in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
The multidisciplinary, collaborative project invited the young people to work in partnership with professionals from the built environment and creative arts industries, to design and build a temporary pavilion and produce a 10-day festival, curated by a team of young Cultural Producers we employed.
The Exhibition
The final pavilion designs and models created by the nine shortlisted teams were hosted at an exhibition at Here East, curated by PoOr Collective as part of London Festival of Architecture. Visitors were invited to vote for the design they wished to see brought to life, with members of the public casting their vote. Over the 3-week period of the exhibition, 1,300 votes were cast.
The Collaborators
The project has been a collaborative, community effort from the start; engaging more than 150 young East London residents who took part in a series of workshops in design, engineering and placemaking led by Re-Fabricate, Scale Rule and architecture students Chun-Li Reed, Bareera Borhaan and Shirin Naveed.
Once the competing teams came together, they completed a design development week with Urban Symbiotics and Beyond The Box, to help shape their ideas. The young aspiring designers visited leading London design studios, AHMM, PDP London, Make Architects, Hawkins Brown, Stephen Taylor Architects, Tate Hindle and Morris & Company, to create models for their designs.
THE WINNING DESIGN
In the summer of 2021, we announced the winning design team, whose vision for the People’s Pavilion was made a reality. They were Shahriyar Ahmed (18), Samira Elbahja (17) and Dellilah Jamal (17) with their design, ‘The Reverie’. The winning team were awarded a £2,000 prize.
THE BUILD
Over a 5 day period, with thanks to a team of volunteers and a crowdfunding campaign that raised over £9,000, we built the People’s Pavilion at Here East Campus in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
THE FESTIVAL
Running in parallel with the design competition was our young cultural producers programme. Working with a team of 10 cultural producers from across East London, we co-designed a 10-day festival that was hosted at The People’s Pavilion.
The festival saw us collaborate with an incredible array of cultural and creative partners, including the V&A Musuem and artist Brendan Barry, with our Lund Point photographic exhibition, live performances by Poetic Unity, immersive DJ sets by Space Black with projected archival images from the Black Cultural Archives, local East London group Your Are Capoeria, workshops with the Royal Drawing School, Vogue workshops with tutor Tony Tran, music from DJ Mark-Ashley Dupé, House of Henna and wellbeing facilitator YSM8, photographer workshops with Brunel Johnson, performances from Sunny Steel Band, panel talks with Resolve Collective, Urban Symbiotics and PoOr Collective, and our LGBT inclusive day with special guests Lady Phyll Founder of UK Black Pride, legendary model and activist Winn Austin, artist BamBam, Stonewall Housing advocate Joshua Asare, and a special screening of the short film ‘There’s always a black issue dear’.
Team Reverie
