Nomadic Museum

摘要

I designed an enormous bamboo Guadua structure for a temporary exhibition of photography and cinema produced by Gregory Colbert. The original design was made by Shigeru Ban. an esteemed Japanese architect. He made the first exhibition on a boat dock in New York City using shipping containers as the structure for the walls and canvas roof covering. Afterwards, he made this in Los Angeles and then in Tokyo. In Japan, artist Gregory Colbert decided that I would do the next structure for his exhibition, but this time in bamboo while keeping some of the containers from the original design. At the same time Shigeru Ban did the exhibition in New York, I was designing a very large circular structure to be constructed in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The project was canceled due to the outbreak of a virus we now know as the Bird Flu. Using 80 Colombian craftsmen and some 100 Mexican workers, we took 3 months to build the Nomadic Museum. It was open for 4 months. It was 100 m long and 50 m wide. The main structure was principally made out of bamboo Guadua, and it had some interior columns that, instead of receiving weight from the roof, were hanging off the roof, acting as ballast, defending the building from the wind. The designs of all these buildings for the Nomadic Museum were inspired by the Arsenal of Venice, where Gregory Colbert made the first presentation of this exhibition: a central nave and 2 lateral naves separated by colonnades. In the Arsenal, the columns were bricks; whereas in Shigeru Ban's, they were cardboard, and in mine, bamboo Guadua are bundled together upside down with the rhizomes forming a capital. With these columns, I managed to give more weight to the roof while giving as homage to the column capitals of the Greeks.