Infinite Grove

Built for a design week within a spring flower festival, this pavilion of about ten square metres turns a single living tree into what reads as a forest without an edge. Two curved walls of mirror-polished stainless steel face each other across the tree and reflect it back and forth until the enclosure seems to dissolve.

The visit unfolds in three steps. From the lawn, the pavilion is a translucent polycarbonate volume with one round opening, through which passers-by catch a fragment of branches and their reflections. Stepping up onto the grated floor, visitors watch the view begin to multiply. At the centre, one real tree stands overhead while a grove runs off in both directions, with the visitors’ own reflections among the leaves. After dark, light from inside turns the pavilion into a lantern on the grass.

The design team draws on two devices of the classical Chinese garden: the framed view, where a moon gate or window decides what the eye meets first, and borrowed scenery, where a garden extends itself by taking in what lies beyond its walls. Neither is quoted in its historical form. The circular opening frames the tree, and the mirrors borrow it, together with the sky, the surroundings and the people inside.

The pavilion was planned from the start to outlive the festival. It is prefabricated as a single steel-framed unit that needs no foundations and travels on one truck, keeping work on site to a minimum. The tree sits in a planter set into the floor and changes at every stop. A flowering azalea filled it in late spring, and an olive tree took its place for the summer at a second site. The structure stays the same, while each new tree makes a different forest.