The Melbourne City Council has agreed to extend the current MPavilion designed by Tadao Ando to March 2025—but what then? Will it remain a permanent feature in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens, recycled, readapted, or simply demolished? For many architects and members of the public, the MPavilion is a sanctuary, an oasis for meditation, and a communal meeting place that exemplifies the very best of contemporary architecture. In the media, Ando is lauded as a “concrete Picasso”, and the building is seen as a significant masterpiece in Ando’s oeuvre.

Presumably, selling Ando to the public as the work of a Picasso is a crude instrument of spin whose underlying naivety or cynicism is appalling: an attitude that presumes that there is a binary between high and low culture, including architecture. The above sentiments might work in the swirl of social media feeds, but ultimately, they benefit no one—yet, we are all addicted to the substances of digital media. Each MPavilion is, in part, a packaged up and commodified theatre, a social media product selling the value of architecture and the events it contains. This MPavilion is arguably reckless, an addictive substance that fuels notions of a conservative and business-as-usual architecture.

Why is this MPavilion reckless?

Firstly, the concrete: we conservatively calculate that the concrete amounts to 117 tonnes (using the EPIC database). This calculation assumes the pavilion is constructed from fly-ash concrete and does not account for reinforcing. It’s too late now. This amount of carbon has already been expelled into the atmosphere. Perhaps in future, each MPavilion can be given an LCA, or embodied carbon, and some serious idea of dismantling or adaptive reuse. 

We pray for the day when the AIA does this and publishes the calculations for every National and State awards winner.

Secondly, tone deafness: This pavilion comes at a time when It is beginning to dawn on architects in the UK and Europe—and more feebly in Australia—the need to stop the relentless demolition of buildings; to do something, to do anything at all, to mitigate the fact that buildings and construction accounts for 37% of the world’s carbon emissions. According to the recently published 2022 Global Buildings Carbon Tracker, the building sector is far from being on track to contributing to the Paris 2050 goals. Given this context, one wonders how the pavilion was even selected. Arguably, the selection was the result of a ‘sensibility’ that constantly elevates the individual architect above all else—even the destruction of Earth’s atmosphere (we await to see how the folly of this approach will unfold in the nearby construction of the much larger NGV commission). 

Thirdly, an outdated architectural sensibility: this pavilion comes at a time when many architects are exploring notions of collaboration and co-design with the community. But for the haute-bourgeoisie, architecture is all about sticking to the same old modernist principles of minimalism: a bit of Mies, maybe Aalto, and a love for Corbusier without Corbusier’s whimsy. This pavilion is only an echo of these modernists, a debased product plucked off a shelf for an antipodean audience. The noisy anarchy of Hundertaavasser is preferable to the po-faced sunlight on concrete, masquerading as a machine to enable spiritual enlightenment.

The purpose of this design is to empty rather than connect. Unlike other architects working in modernist traditions—Alvaro Siza springs to mind—the pavilion has no relationship to the body; the proportions are simply static, and moving around, there are only diminished haptic sensations. Within the seemingly Zen Buddhist spirituality of the MPavilion interior, there is no sense of reverberation; the water reflecting on the aluminium canopy is little more than reflections of the dribble. This is a limited and debased notion of the esoteric life, and one aligned with consumption: there are no spirits and beings of Country conjured up in this design. The King’s Domain resting place is not far away. Perhaps the contemplative practices engendered by this pavilion quickly disappear into the interior of the self and narcissistic meditation, practices that erase the ancestral and living beings of Country. If the concrete panels or the aluminium can’t be recycled or repurposed, Melbourne will be stuck with this chunk of concrete lard, and if it stays, what does that say about Melbourne and its cultural and intellectual life?

But… but…

Yes, and yes, philanthropy is great for architecture in this country. Yes, and yes, the MPavilion program has been great for promoting architecture to the public. But this MPavilion is a tragic and tone-deaf mistake. A mistake of patronage that threatens to trash the brand of this important philanthropic initiative. And for those of us who value the earth, this is a folly that sells the architecture of concrete as a material that must be seen in a more problematic light, to say the least.

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Concrete Eulogies

Watch our critique of the concrete pavilion and discussions of the state of concrete in architecture.