A one of its kind handmade pavilion, believed to be Australia’s largest bamboo structure designed by an Indian architect using all organic materials from India, opened in Melbourne in Queen Victoria Gardens.
The third annual summer pavilion, designed by Indian architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, officially opened. Claimed as Australia’s largest bamboo structure, MPavilion 2016 has been included as a part of the programme for the ongoing Indian fest ‘Confluence: Festival of India’ that is running across major Australian cities.
MPavilion 2016, a handmade architectural piece, uses seven km of bamboo, 50 tonnes of stone and 26 km of rope to create an extraordinary 16.8 m square pavilion which sits on a bluestone floor sourced from a quarry in Port Fairy, Victoria.
Bamboo poles imported from India especially for the MPavilion are pegged together with 5,000 wooden pins and lashed together with rope and slatted panels that form the MPavilion roof are constructed from sticks from the Karvi plant woven together by craftspeople in India over four months.
The MPavilion 2016 design employed handcrafted Indian construction methods, refined in collaboration with a team of Australian builders from Kane Construction who travelled to Mumbai to take part in Mr Bijoy Jain’s collaborative and intuitive approach to design and construction.
