Bahrain Pavilion
- The Kingdom of Bahrain National Pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015 is a large enclosure (15 x 87 m, 12 m high) made of dry-assembled, prefabricated concrete blocks. This cyclopean masonry defines a closed box, decorated on the upper course with a palmette frieze and so resembling the traditional enclosures assembled by Bahraini farmers with palm leaves in order to protect their cultivations (Barasti).
The prism contains two rooms: the desert room and the garden room.
The two rooms are following a precise sequence: the visitor first encounters the desert, and then rests in the garden.
The desert room’s floor is covered with sand and rocks and its walls are made of mirroring aluminium panels that multiply the room on its four sides, thus producing the vertigo that is associated to the infinity of the desert. Above the door leading to the next room, a water tank connected to a system of pipes leads water to the garden room. On the opposite wall, large fans produce the wind that pertains to the Bahraini desert.
The garden room is entirely filled with a fountain: the water arriving from the aforementioned tank flows along the four walls, streams through a series of spouts and canals and meanders along the terraces. The main vegetal species cultivated in Bahrain are spread along the water circuit, and thus provide an overview of Bahrain’s agricultural production.
The Expo is a crowded, noisy place, with an excess of communication and a surplus of messages. The Pavilion of Bahrain offers an oasis of rest to this tired audience, sharing only the silence of the desert and the murmur of the water.
2.1 The Problem of Expo Pavilions
Pavilions are the main product exhibited by a country participating in an Expo. As such, more than buildings, pavilions are models of possible buildings, of possible cities, of possible landscapes. They are buildings that contain a multitude of buildings, a multitude of cities, a multitude of landscapes. As a consequence, pavilions end up being at the same time more and less than buildings: something grandiose and exceptional and yet ephemeral, unreal, at the same time multiplying and vanishing like in One Thousand and One Nights’ progression to the infinite.
Contrary to normal buildings, pavilions do not really have a function, a program, yet they follow a theme, a narrative. They challenge the architecture’s constitutive incapacity of speaking; they are the one and only case in which Architecture Parlante is not only possible, but also somehow needed.
The new pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain is simple and spectacular. The building neither refuses its obligation to marvel, nor objects to exhibiting its own narrative. It explicitly recognizes that its main problem is the rigorous construction of wonder, the abstract articulation of a story.
2.2 Thematic architecture
The new pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain faces the theme of the Expo (“Feeding the Planet/ Energy for Life”) by bluntly exposing the two alternatives of food production in Bahrain. Indeed, Bahrain can only choose between two options: desert or garden. As such, the pavilion shows both the extreme geographical condition and the extraordinary intelligence that needs to be applied in order to cultivate vegetal species in such conditions.
The pavilion stages this alternative by building a simple – and yet emotional – narrative of the passage from the desert to the garden.
The theme of the pavilion thus becomes the experience of the pavilion. Narrative is directly turned into space. The pavilion becomes a phenomenology of two landscapes. In fact, desert and garden are not just combined into the new pavilion, on the contrary they are arranged following a precise perceptive sequence within which desert appears first (as a given, as a condition) and garden comes only after (as a possibility, as an achievement). As a matter of fact, desert in Bahrain is not really a landscape – as Bahrain is too small to be considered a desert – but a condition, which defines a series of constraints that need to be overcome by human labour and intelligence. As such, the garden, according to the classic association that goes throughout Islamic tradition, appears as an explicit abode of pleasure, opposed to the harshness of the desert. The garden becomes the core of the pavilion, hosting all the required functions and defining a pleasant, generous, luxuriant ambient: a Paradeisos (according to the ancient Persian expression for enclosed garden).
2.3 Spectacle of Landscapes
The Kingdom of Bahrain National Pavilion is simple and spectacular: it exposes two landscapes not by allusion or description, but by the production of two spatial conditions.
The pavilion does not require too complex interpretations. The building accepts the distracted perception of the Expo audience by avoiding illustrating too many technicalities, or venturing into too ambitious didactic attempts. The narrative of the pavilion is extremely intuitive and immediate. This extreme simplicity leaves space for a wide range of possible associations: desert and garden indeed are not just ecologies, but imply an entire range of anthropologic, religious, philosophical and literary associations.
By being just desert and garden, the pavilion reduces the issue of exhibiting the identity of Bahrain to its basic geographic and agricultural situations. Beyond any Orientalism, beyond any form of branding, the new pavilion exposes the desert as a human condition (from an anthropologic perspective) and exhibits the garden a multi-layered cultural construction associating water, garden, happiness and paradise. Desert and garden are presented without explanations, evident to anybody, and at the same time opening up an infinite chain of possible relations.
As a building made of landscapes, the new pavilion refers to architectural figures that made the attempt to capture the complexity of an entire landscape within architecture. As such, the new pavilion relates to a large chain of possible precedents, coming from varied sources, both Eastern and Western: it obviously refers to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, as well as to the Generalife in Granada’s Alhambra, to the Villa d’Este, to the fountain of the ninety-nine spouts in Aquila, to Schinkel’s project for the terraced garden of Prince Wilhelm’s palace, to the two Qasr al-Hayr, to Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and Lawrence Halprin’s Keller fountain.
3.1 Pavilion, description
A small antechamber introduces both the garden and the desert rooms.
The first antechamber, leading from the pavilion’s entrance along the main decumanus of the Expo to the desert room, simply dissimulates the desert from the outside, producing a mediated entry into the first room. The small space is reached from the outside through one big gate. Two smaller doors open it to the desert room. On the short ends of the dark antechamber are two aquarium installations showing samples of the Bahrain coral reef.
The desert room has no roof, it is only an enclosed space.
Although precipitations are limited from May to October in Milan, the desert room will be constantly dry thanks to an adequate drainage system. The desert sand lays on top of a draining layer allowing almost immediate drainage to the whole surface (the system operates as a sand beach).
The second antechamber, leading from the desert room to the garden room also leads to the lobby, to the information desk and to the stairs and elevator connecting to the VIP room on the upper level of the terraced garden.
The garden room is covered with a glazed roof, supported by a green painted, steel space-frame. The indoor climate is computer-controlled, using a relatively common green-house technology. In case of excessive heating, the glazed roof opens and a white curtain slides to reduce solar radiation.
The stepped area at the centre of the garden room can also be used to host the audience of performances, shows and lectures hold at the centre of the room. Opposite the entrance, on the garden room’s short end, a flight of steps reaches to the bar. On the long southern side, the pavilion’s exit leads to the piazza on the backside. The visitors thus cross the entire building diagonally, entering at the centre and leaving from the western side.
3.2 The Pavilion, technical specifications
The pavilion is entirely assembled on site by combining pre-fabricated materials. The building will equally be disassembled at the conclusion of the Expo, simply inverting the construction process.
The foundations are made of steel I-beams in form of a double ring running along the perimeter of the pavilion, 60 cm below the ground. This solution, normally used for the foundations of heavy pieces of industrial machinery, allows for the removal of the entire foundations at the conclusion of the Expo. Similar smaller foundations run below the internal walls of the garden room.
The walls of the enclosure are made of pre-fabricated concrete blocks. The hollow blocks are industrially produced and transported to the construction site on trucks. On site, they are assembled by a crane and later connected through metallic joints without any use of mortar. The 15 cm thick hollow blocks are of three different kinds, according to their positions inside of the walls. All the blocks are connected to the lower and upper courses through a simple rabbet joint. Special pieces are used at the corners.
In the desert room, the blocks lack the internal facing in order to facilitate fixing the mirroring aluminium panels which envelope the room.
The internal walls are made with similar smaller blocks. The floor slabs are also in pre-fabricated concrete. All blocks are coloured by introducing a dark ochre pigment into the concrete mix.
3.3 The Fountain
The garden room is organized as a terraced fountain, with water running along the four sides of the room. Forty-four spouts pour water from the upper to the lower steps of the room, not only nourishing the plants but also producing an articulated symphony of sounds expanding into the room. The garden room is a multi-sensorial experience: not only visual but also involving sound and smell.
The water circuit pipes are in brass.
Inside the garden room, water is turned into a spectacle, thus illustrating the need (and the potential) for an innovative management of the water resources of Bahrain. Indeed the 1970s large-scale land reclamation produced an environmental imbalance that still haunts Bahrain’s agriculture, reducing the quantity and the variety of the cultivations. Exposing the potential of an innovative water management (already in place as in the case of the TSE programs started in the 2000s), beyond promoting the country on an international level, will help increasing the environmental consciousness in Bahrain. The pavilion indeed addresses two audiences: an external, international one and an internal, domestic one. With respect to the domestic audience, the pavilion can operate as a tool in a campaign for a more attentive use of water resources and expansion of the amount of vegetal species available.
3.4 Vegetation
The pavilion contains nine different vegetal species distributed along the terraces. All these species have productive uses: they produce edible fruits, are planted as forage crops or are employed for the cosmetic or pharmaceutical industry.
The plants’ size decreases from the upper to the lower level of the room, with the species getting smaller as they come closer to the visitor.
On the upper level a ring of date palms (Phoenix dactylifera) encircles the garden. The palms evocate the 23 species of dates cultivated on the island.
On a lower level, pomegranates (Punica granatum) are planted towards the entrance. They are combined with tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum), capers (Capparis spinosa) and aloe (Aloe vera). On lower levels Alfaalfa (Medicago sativa) alternates with Allium shoenoprasum, Allium spharocephalon and Allium caeruleum.
The garden exhibits a way to combine the traditional palm trees with other vegetal varieties, producing a complex environment, so exposing a model that could contrast the overuse of the palm tree as decorative vegetation that characterised Bahraini gardening in recent years. In this respect, the pavilion could operate as an innovative model addressing to the domestic audience.
An aviary at the end of the garden room contains singing birds, contributing together with the water jets to the production of the music of the Paradeisos.
