Yellow Pavilion - a temporary pavilion for the London Festival of Architecture

The modular Yellow Pavilion, located at Cubitt Square, King’s Cross for the duration of the festival, was designed to share commonalities with the nearby Coal Drops Yard and its Victorian arches. The pavilion was built to house a library of reclaimed bricks, 1000 pieces of Irish architecture, the components that make up a city and a particular road in Belfast.

The pavilion is designed with distinctly different daytime and nighttime identities. During daytime, the slight angles of the arches and folds in the structure create an ever-changing shadow-play on the outer elevations. The larger size arches at high level allow plenty of daylight to enter the structure, illuminating the bricks on display. After sundown, discrete lighting within the structure reveals the pavilion’s geometry against a glowing core. Linear light sources concealed behind a suspended raft within the structure illuminate the exhibited bricks and give a soft highlight to the yellow coloured walls and ceiling. Lighting mock-ups and studies ensured that the light would travel deep within each shelf so that all bricks were well presented.

Hall McKnight’s exploration of yellow colour saturation was boosted by the warmth and colour rendering qualities of the artificial lighting that oversaturates the colour, making the structure’s presence against the blue evening sky even stronger.

Architect: Hall McKnight
Lighting Sponsor: LED Linear, Architctural FX
Press coverage: ArchDaily, Dezeen, Architects Journal