Garden Pavilion Concept

What happens when architecture tries to disappear? This conceptual pavilion for a Johannesburg garden explores the threshold between inside and outside as a question rather than an answer. The design is radically simple: a glazed volume suspended within a lightweight steel frame, with no fixed enclosure on three sides. Motorised glass walls slide into concealed pockets, transforming the pavilion from enclosed room to open shelter to floating platform as the occupants desire. A continuous timber deck extends the interior plane into the garden, blurring the edge between built and planted. The roof plane floats above the glass on slender columns, appearing to hover. The project is intentionally minimal — not as a stylistic choice but as a conceptual one: to test whether architecture can facilitate a direct experience of landscape without mediating it. The answer, we believe, is yes — but only when every element of enclosure is questioned.