Highly Innovative Pavilion for London 2012 Olympic Games: The Coca-Cola Beatbox

Coca-Cola iconic brand, one of the London 2012 Olympic Games Worldwide Partners, announced in December 2011 to design their pavilion, called “The Coca-Cola Beatbox“,  for the London 2012 Olympic park, and now it seems that it’s taking shape. With a history of collaborating on ingenious projects, rising young architects Pernilla & Asif are responsible to realize the company’s vision – a “building with a beat”: something quite unusual, interactive, which have to integrate the iconic red and white of Coke, fragmenting the colours across the building, and most importantly having no visible logos. The creative concept of “The Coca-Cola Beatbox” pavilion takes inspiration from Move to the Beat™ Coca-Cola’s campaign for the London 2012 Olympic Games launched in February 2012 with a bit of help from Mark Ronson and Katy B.

The campaign, along with its amazing physical form, tries to capture and celebrate the energy of British youth. Predicted to see close to 200,000 visitors during the Olympic games, the iconic building will combine in an innovative way experimental architecture and cutting edge sound technology to create a stunning visual and sensory experience. The structure will work as a giant musical instrument, which has it’s own beat and visitors can hear and “play” their own beats by remixing Olympics soundtrack specially created by Mark Ronson for Coca-Cola, via sounds embedded in the architecture. Aiming to inspire young people to pursue their passions, Coca-Cola company want to take their “Beatbox” original architecture to a global audience, to be something that people have never seen or heard before.

The project  follows complex planning requirements such as durability and flow capacity to withstand that level of activity, a rapid construction and demount strategy, stringent sustainability guidelines and the ability to go from concept design to completion in one year. Challenging, isn’t it? But perhaps not as large as the idea of turning the red and white surfaces of the pavilion’s exterior ‘garland’ into a building-sized musical instrument to be played. To create the pavilion will be needed 230 of the red and white translucent ETFE cushions (aluminium-framed and inflated), which will have audio and interaction technology integrated into their membranes all over the building. A spiralling ramp leading from behind the panels onto the roof of the pavilion will offer a panoramic view across the park. Rough, sawn black stained timber is used on the roof and interior. Very interesting is the fact that this groudbreaking design will feature environmentally friendly technology, so once the Olympic Games are over all remaining materials will either be reused by the contractor or recycled. The ETFE garland will be carefully disassembled and will maybe be used for another project.