WEBB CHAPEL PARK PAVILION

With elegant, robust materiality and a fun, cool place to inhabit, this pavilion is a hub of local life.

As part of a Design Excellence program that brought architects from different parts of the country to Dallas to bring new perspectives, Studio Joseph took requirements for durability to heart, and listened carefully to community needs. With seating areas facing both a soccer field and a playground, the pavilion has brought together different constituencies with divergent priorities. 

Designed with a few bold gestures and inspired by the local vernacular, this simple picnic pavilion is designed to take advantage of passive, natural cooling. A concrete canopy of exaggerated depth enables long cantilevers and open corners. The result is an impressive sense of floating mass that sits atop only three structural supports. Underneath, the dense shell of concrete opens to reveal four, asymmetrical pyramidal voids in the roof each with a different orientation. With a whimsical surprise of a brilliant yellow, the ceiling’s primary purpose is as a natural ventilation system encouraging convection breezes resulting from the temperature differential between seating embedded in a berm (cooled by thermal mass) and the hot Texan air above.

The use of poured-in-place concrete as both structure and finish is both expressive and efficient and the result embraces the duality between material weight and lightness of being.