established city beyond. The object is sitting on top of a multi-storey car park that belongs to Westfield Stratford City, a mammoth 1.9 million square metre shopping centre that when completed will be the continent’s largest. To generate interest in its forthcoming opening, the retail developer commissioned the project, produced in collaboration with bespoke east London restaurateurs Bistrotheque. If these two clients were a married couple you’d think Cupid had a lamentably rotten aim or a very wry sense of humour. Launching some years back in a whitewashed warehouse in an abandoned part of Hackney, the original restaurant made itself a destination most notably for its esoteric evening entertainments – I especially admired the Bear Beauty Contest (for hairier, heavier gay men; not a woodland version of Crufts). You might not immediately think the pairing likely to work out, but the resulting creative success proves that opposites can and do attract. Carmody Groarke’s design was
informed by the project’s specific constraints. One of the earliest decisions was to borrow materials already on the site, using workmen
seconded from the shopping centre’s construction. The structure was made entirely from scaffolding poles; the wooden floor, panelling, even the tables, from planks. The translucent polyethylene roof membrane was bought especially, but is, the architects are pleased to say, 100 per cent recyclable. As a live building site, people
have to be ferried safely to and from the restaurant, which influenced the idea of a single sitting for 140 people. Instead of making one large marquee-like space, the conversation distance across a dining table has created the scale of the cross-section to series of extruded forms. These volumes intersect at the plan’s centre to provide a cocktail-supping place of the arrival; guests then move to one of the long, linear tables to dine. With the pavilion fortuitously coinciding with the summer solstice, when you arrive the space is naturally lit, articulating the almost Gothic decorative quality of the structure. As you progress through the courses (and drinks) the lighting provided by standard site lamps offers an increasingly intimate atmosphere. The denouement is a post-prandial stroll to the balconies, to the panoramic views that, glimpsed
throughout the evening, can be fully appreciated as the sun descends. Externally, as you leave, the pavilion enshrines itself as a glowing angular form in the crepuscular light. Across the globe, the once-
chasmic distance between the centre and periphery of culture is now quickly traversed, a change certainly catalysed by the speed and abundance of communication. Particularly in London, the distinction between commerce and creativity, money and art, has become muddied over recent years, and yet the blurry threshold is still perceptible and significant. The same comparison is becoming true for the city map itself. It seems incredible that the once-remote Stratford is now reachable from the metropolitan King’s Cross within minutes. Carmody Groarke’s canniness has been to create a pavilion that accentuates the inherent contradictions in the project’s complexion, while appearing to straddle wider divisions, embracing its status and rejecting it at the same time. It is the Wildean epigram of 21st century temporary architecture, a light little expression that somehow conveys some deeper, more meaningful truth about the city.
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