Design Miami Pavilion (DMP), 2014 by Jonathan Muecke
Image by James Harris

Design Miami Pavilion (DMP)

Minneapolis-based designer Jonathan Muecke has been commissioned to create the Pavilion for the tenth anniversary of Design Miami/. Muecke studied architecture at Iowa State, interning at the architectural office of Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland before studying design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Muecke has evolved a design practice that resists standard divisions between design, art and architecture, instead focusing on refined forms that investigate notions of positive and negative space, positional relationships to structures and the innate desire to read notions of functionality into objects that relate to human scale.

Centered around a double-layered circular structure with apertures at both poles, Jonathan Muecke’s Design Miami Pavilion (DMP) is designed on a human scale, rejecting monumentality in favor of lightness and variability. Filtered through a translucent canopy that shelters the whole structure, light will bounce off the curved and colored surfaces of the pavilion – complementary tones of red and green within, primary blue and yellow without – creating a shifting topography of reflected color. Seamlessly shaped seating units made from composite will allow visitors a moment of quiet reflection in a space conceived in part as a refuge from the hyper-stimulating environment of the fair itself.

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