Iwan Baan , Erik Petersen

OBJECTIVE

Francis Kéré and his team at Kéré Architecture designed Xylem Pavilion, the visitors’ shelter for the Tippet Rise Art Center, as a quiet, protective canopy. Named to evoke the vital internal layers of a tree’s living structure, Xylem Pavilion is a place where visitors of this vast outdoor art space can gather to converse, or sit and contemplate in solitude.
How to go about achieving this was informed by the wish to give a nod to the kindred aspects within the cultural practices at Tippet Rise Art Center and those in Francis Kéré’s home town of Gando. Simultaneously massive yet light, the roof is inspired by the tuguna, a sacred gathering space of many small Burkinabè communities – a low-level wood and straw shelter that offers protection from the sun while allowing for ventilation. Depending on the community’s need it serves as event center, town hall, informal gathering area or cultural space.
For Xylem Pavilion, the canopy is fashioned from logs that are grouped in circular bundles within a modular hexagonal structure in weathering steel, supported by seven steel columns. The upper surface of the canopy is carved sinuously to blend into the surrounding hills. The material used and the form of the structure achieve the additional objective of seamlessly merging the pavilion with its surrounding landscape. An interplay of nature’s design and human-made architecture.
Both in the objective of use and the objective of design the project creates gentle connections and establishes respectful relationships between seemingly distant realms.

CONTEXT

Located in a slightly sunken landform between the main facilities of the Tippet Rise Art Centre, a vast outdoor art centre stretching across 12,000 acres in southcentral Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park, and the start of its hiking tracks, Xylem Pavilion nestles in a clearing surrounded by aspen trees, facing a small creek.
The project is the result of an extensive exchange between client and architect. The former having come across the latter’s work at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, where Francis Kéré had created a wooden canopy to host a presentation about his architectural practice, that would go on to inspire Xylem Pavilion itself.
Intrigued both by the design and the larger context of the work, the project was to represent a twin in spirit to the Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School being built in parallel in Francis Kéré’s birthplace, Gando.
As is his approach in Gando, Xylem Pavilion is made with material abundant and overlooked in its locality. In Burkina Faso Francis Kéré works to reclaim clay as a contemporary building material, and in Montana he turned to sustainably sourced pine. The wood used for the entire pavilion, locally sourced by collecting dead trees killed by the mountain pine bark beetle, is here used in its raw state. Local and familiar it is a material for which the necessary knowledge of how to handle it existed within the region, allowing for innovative use of it, which built on expertise, expanding it in the process.