Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion | Marlon Blackwell Architect

Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion | Notes of Interest The Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion is the result of a studied relationship between building, land and art, and serves as both a threshold to and a destination within the 100 Acres Art & Nature Park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The goal was to craft a logic of ideas and physical works that reveal the repressed raw power of environment, art, and architecture through a rethinking and re-making of ‘where we already are.’ Questions are born from within the found condition, resulting in an immanent response, imbued with conviction, meaning, and significance for the Museum of Art, its patrons and the citizens of Indianapolis. The Visitors Pavilion is a place of shared resolve where nature and artifice are sensually perceived as one and many; the detail and horizon. The 100 acre park site is born of wildly turbulent natural and cultural phenomena constantly changing the land’s structure, and is a place where one becomes conscious of the residual forms that reveal the creative life force at work in our world. Tinkering with it as cultivated urban wilds proves a sound means of joining Nature and City as a recovered, unpredictably changing but cultivated landscape. Prone to flooding across the entire park by the White River, the park offers less than an acre for the construction of the Ruth Lily Visitors Pavilion. Additional Credit Engineer: Guy Nordenson & Associates; L'Acquis Consulting Engineers; Cripe Architects & Engineers General Contractor: Geupel DeMars Hagerman Landscape Design: The Landscape Studio; NINebark Jury Comments This pavilion is artfully cast in the shadows of the adjacent trees, its transparency is enhanced by its latticed canopy which filters light thru its entirety and the floor to ceiling glazing hides no secrets. Its low posture and horizontal form enhances the encompassing flora and is quite elegant in its lightness while reaching out and inviting nature in.