Puppet Pavilion is a soft amorphous hanging theatre space that inhabits the cavernous but intricate Turbine Hall. It envelops the audience and performers intimately like a child’s fabric cubby. The structure removes the static formality of familiar structures and appeals to our yearning of simpler times, of soft, tactile spaces, to cuddle and be lost in. The form of the pavilion is produced through the interaction of gravity on the tessellated grid surface hung in tension from an array of winches.  These winches can be controlled to contort the surface, like a marionette or puppet, to provide spaces suited specifically to the mood of the audience.

The form of the space can dictate the mood of an event, it can be small and intimate, large and expansive, tall and dramatic, low and claustrophobic. Colourful on the outside and muted on the inside, it wraps around the performers and audience while leaving the floor clear for the director’s and set designer’s program.

The surface is composed of triangle modules made from thick shag hair carpet tiles. At the centre of the surface large triangles dominate. The triangles recursively reduce in size, as a fractal, towards the outer edges. The smaller triangles, now at a human scale, allow the audience to disrupt and interact with the surface as they pass to and from the space.  As the surface is changed and comes to rest, the geometry creates a form much like the drapery studies of Albrecht Dürer or Leonardo da Vinci, but faceted and abstracted.