BOULDER PAVILION
Programme: National Park Visitor Centre
Location: Joshua Tree National Park, California, 2004
Design Architect: Teh Kan Wee Wagen, AIA
The proposed Boulder Pavilion is a vertical visitor centre that elevates visitors to different heights and bring them closer to the jumbo rocks to experience the thrill of scaling them. The design concept is inspired by fractals in nature, a highly efficient bottom up geometric progression system that is made up of self-similar modules.
The design utilizes a basic building module, inspired by the boulders weathering process, for multiplication at different scales to populate the complex network of weathered crevices. The self-similar basic building module are repeated to achieve economies of scale and to produce more intelligent and complex global geometries that are responsive and integrative with the organic crevices of the Jumbo Rocks at Joshua Tree National Park.