Nomadic Museum

To house the traveling exhibition “Ashes and Snow” by artist Gregory Colbert, Simon Vélez designed a monumental 5,000 m2 bamboo structure. The design comprised of a roof and four ruled surfaces formed by an array of bamboo tubes along a sine curve at the base and a straight line on top. Sporadic protrusion of steel shipping containers puncture the curved wall and give hints of the interior spaces and exhibition inside. To ensure the stability of the light-weight roof, Velez chose to weigh down the structure with bunches of Guadua culms whose rhizomes form a garland at the top. The building's reference to the hypostyle hall is at once understood and simultaneously challenged, as the columns are not anchored in the earth but rather, they hang from the trusses and are suspended from the ground.