The construction of a giant complex on the island of Saadiat should, according to the idea of its creators, turn the capital of the UAE into an international cultural center. Four main buildings were commissioned by the most famous architects in the world (it is specially emphasized that three of them are Pritzker laureates). Frank Gary designs the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum of Contemporary Art, Zaha Hadid the Theater Arts Center, Jean Nouvelle the Classical Art Museum and Tadao Ando the Maritime Museum.
In addition to four large museums, the Biennale Park was conceived with 19 pavilions, in which, depending on the circumstances, both temporary and permanent exhibitions and performances will be arranged. So far, seven authors are known. Among them are Greg Lynn (USA), named by Forbes magazine as one of the ten most popular contemporary architects in the world, Hani Rashid and Liz Ann Couture (Asymptote Group, USA) Khalid Alnayar (UAE), David Angie (UK), Pay- Zhu (China), Seng H-Sang (Korea).
The director of the Guggenheim Foundation Thomas Krenz invited a Russian architect, one of the leaders of the “paper architecture” movement, Yuri Avvakumov, to design pavilion site # 1, who co-authored the project with another “former paper” architect Andrei Savin (architectural studio “AB”).
The Avvakumov & Savin pavilion from the outside looks like a geometrically stylized clawed paw with five fingers - rays extended towards the city. Above (and on the plan) it is the shape of a palm leaf (just next to an alley with palm trees), the points of which are cut off at the edges of the site, but continue in the upper part by the outreach of arrow-shaped windows of an amazing shape: at the top there are long "peaks", under them are the crystalline bulges of large windows. At night, the windows will glow, folding into a kind of showcase-sign, facing the city.
Thus, the building is neatly inscribed in the designated boundaries, but does not occupy the entire site, but is divided into five corridors converging in one central hall. The corridors are two-tiered, in the upper part of each of them there is a gallery. In addition, the three middle beams can be fenced off with temporary walls in order to arrange there housing for the artist in residence, that is, living and working right in the pavilion. The walls of the outer rays are made of glass; during the day, the park alleys will be visible from there, and at night, on the contrary, the pavilion will glow and from the outside you will see what is happening inside. To look from the inside to the outside and from the outside to the inside it was more comfortable, it is supposed to use polarized glass.
Having cut the plan with zigzags of rays, the architects, in addition to the crystalline-biomorphic uniqueness of the volume, received an increase in the area of the probable hanging of the exposition: if you put an ordinary building on such an area, the length of its walls will be about one hundred meters, and here, having formed like an accordion, "useful planes" increase their length more than twice (almost 250 m), explains Yuri Avvakumov.
The authors also name a variety of sources for their composition: the most classic is the Teatro Olimpico Andrea Palladio, where the passages behind the stage were arranged to converge towards its center; the most similar is the club to them. Rusakov Konstantin Melnikov, and the most original - the American B2 bomber. Such a scatter of parallels speaks not so much of the classicism as of the novelty of the solution based on the hypertrophy of the radial layout, which is more typical for cities than for exhibition pavilions. In general, the theme of building the rudiment of a city inside a single pavilion seems alien to this project: it literally consists of one square and five streets, where, as happens in cities, someone could really live. The constant interpenetration of external and internal spaces (during the day - there, at night - from there), reinforces the feeling that a relatively small building is making a bold attempt to instill in the neighboring Arab capital the values of the classical layout of European cities and parks.
However, in addition to the associations inspired by vivid imagery, the project has a very real subtext - this is the first in a long time for Russian architects to enter the real world practice of a high class. It is very important that our architects were ordered not to the national pavilion of the country, where the participation of one of our compatriots would have been inevitable, but to the pavilion of the Park Biennale of the exhibition, which has serious claims to become a new world art center from the Guggenheim circle. Perhaps, since the time of the victories of "paper architects" in the competitions of foreign magazines, this is the first step towards their serious international recognition.
