Award-winning artist and designer Es Devlin OBE is set to design the UK Pavilion for Expo 2020 Dubai. The scheme, titled “Poem Pavilion” will highlight “leading British expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Space,” and will be produced in collaboration with global brand agency Avantgarde.
The Poem Pavilion will feature an illuminated “Message to Space,” with each of the Expo’s projected 25 million visitors invited to contribute.
For the pavilion’s design, Devlin will draw on previous experience with artificial intelligence, such as her luminous red “Fifth Lion” sculpture during the 2018 London Design Festival, and her design for the London Olympics Closing Ceremony. Renderings of the proposition depict visitors arriving through “an illuminated maze featuring augmented reality-enriched exhibits on British advances in Artificial Intelligence and Space.”
Devlin will also be the first female designer of a UK Pavilion since its inception in 1851, leading a predominantly female team of experts from the fields of artificial intelligence and space technology. Devlin views the project as an inspiration for “girls and young women to investigate areas of science and technology that they might otherwise have felt weren’t for them.”
The idea draws directly on one of Stephen Hawking’s final projects, ‘Breakthrough Message’, a global competition that Hawking and his colleagues conceived in 2015 inviting people worldwide to consider what message we would communicate to express ourselves as a planet, should we one day encounter other advanced civilizations in Space. What if the UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 becomes a place where visitors from all over the world take part in a collective global project that showcases British expertise in A.I. technologies and poetry while transcending national identities?
-Es Devlin
For the scheme’s realization, Devlin will work in collaboration with Manchester-based structural engineers Atelier One, and award-winning sustainability engineers Atelier Ten.
News of the pavilion comes after Fentress Architects were chosen to design the USA Pavilion, with further contributions for main pavilions from Foster + Partners, BIG, and Grimshaw.
News via: Es Devlin
