NETSCAPE

SCI_Arc Graduation Pavilion, 2011

Los Angeles, CA

Every year in early September, as graduate students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles put the finishing touches on their thesis projects, a Sci-Arc faculty member and students prepare a temporary pavilion for the annual graduation ceremony.  This year, faculty members Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Wu Collaborative, along with their students, designed a pavilion entitled Netscape for the event that stretches across the northern end of the SCI-Arc parking lot, providing seating for 900.  Consisting of 45,000 linear feet of knitted rope, 6000 linear feet of tube steel, and 3000 square feet of fabric shade louvers, the pavilion creates a sail-like canopy of rope and fabric that floats above the audience.  With its fabric louvers tilted toward the western sky, the canopy is designed to provide shade for the specific date and time.

Netscape utilizes a double layer of netting in varying configurations to create a three-dimensional field of billowing shade louvers.  Based on a conventional knitting technique, like that used in the making of a sweater, the pavilion exploits the malleability of this technique as it stretches to conform to the three-dimensional shape of the structure.  Unlike a conventional net, the knitting technique is not fixed at its intersections, allowing the shape of the nets (and their grids) to contort both at the upper and the lower surface.  With the nets contorting differently, the shade louvers that are stretched between them become a dynamic field of fabric, twisting and bending in order to span across the space in between.