We are proud to announce that Modelo is the official 3D visualization technology provider for the winning team of Design Miami’s pavilion competition. Congratulations to the UNBUILT team, a group of five talented Harvard GSD students pictured below with the pavilion. 

Design Miami/ is the global forum for design that takes place annually in the welcoming, vibrant, and warm Floridian city of Miami. The forum brings together designers, critics and collectors, among others who are interested in art, fashion, and architecture. Each year, Design Miami/ commissions an architecture firm to design the entrance pavilion. But this year was a bit different. Instead of selecting a young professional firm for the commission, a group of university students competed for the honor. In a field of 32 competing Harvard Graduate School of Design teams, the winning team pavilion entry is “UNBUILT”! The team is comprised of five MArch 1 students: Joanne Cheung, Yiliu Shen-Burke, Jenny Shen, Steven Meyer, and Doug Harsevoort (pictured above). This design competition provided the students with a real life example of the design build process and resulted in the participation from members throughout the GSD community, due to its collaborative nature.

The UNBUILT team used pink foam to recreate 198 physical models from submissions from the GSD student body and implemented new 3D visualization technology from Modelo to enable easy digital access to every model through its website unbuilt.miami. The title of the pavilion signifies that the models, each with its own unique design merits will ultimately be limited to model form, going unconstructed at a larger scale. The pink foam gives the project a bit of a whimsical feel allowing the school to have free will and to not take themselves too seriously. Still, the project took months of hard work and coordination with dozens of designers, collaborators and departments. The GSD put together a preview of the process in the following video.

Jenny Shen comments, “It’s fun to make a model and send them [the creators] a photo and they see this funny pink version of something they’ve worked on for a long time. It’s very gratifying to work with such a huge number of the community.”

Aside from being representations of past designs from GSD students, faculty, and practitioners that never had the chance to be created the team felt that together these models represent something bigger: a reflection of the culture of the GSD, a learning institution for all. The team’s idea was to be inclusive in its submission as opposed to picking one form and sticking to it on the site. 

“It was important for us to create this platform where you submit what you want to submit,” Steven told us. This was the foundation of the UNBUILT design pavilion project.

Visitors to the conference quickly learn that not everything from afar looks the same up close. From a distance, the pavilion might look like a pink field or cloud, but when you get up close you realize that every single particle has its own universe. The design had to function as a pavilion, which meant providing some amount of shade and an indication of entry way. Why pink foam? Foam takes up space and is malleable; the color pink mirrors the Miami culture and adds pop sensibility. The team’s focus was on creating a story and involving many characters in that story. UNBUILT takes something familiar that makes sense and speaks to architecture, but also speaks to a wider audience. When visitors are inside the pavilion, it’s experienced as an upside-down city; the words ‘invisible city’ were present from the very beginning for the team. The pavilion consists of a canopy of models, which provides shade and gathering space for visitors and a different perspective, since the sky is always the background for these pink 3D models.

“All of these models are proposals for things that could be made but may never exist. When you’re inside the pavilion, the hypothetical city mirrors the real city below. We like that duality,” Joanne Cheung explains.

The team hopes to create a dialogue of design and demonstrate how that plays into architecture and the consumers of architecture, more so than another version of the pavilion. Yiliu mentions, “I would like to think as well that people realized our statement is more than just that the ‘GSD makes a lot of models.’ But that there’s something deeper about the process of creating something without the intention necessarily of realizing it at full scale, but about understanding the process, understanding what you have to gain from the process.”

Modelo’s role 

Modelo met with the UNBUILT team for an interview the same day that the 198 pink models were loaded onto a truck and driven to Miami. With a great sense of excitement and relief the team reflected on the overall experience and discussed their hopes for the digital representation of the models. Beyond the physical models actually creating the pavilion, the team also wanted to give visitors the opportunity to experience each model in-depth digitally with information about the designer and the form. Modelo’s 3D visualization platform supplies the technology needed for this presentation through the web browser. Visitors attending Design Miami/ are able to access the models in 3D throughout the conference and after via the UNBUILT team’s website.

During our discussion Doug pointed out that this digital experience allows visitors to connect with UNBUILT and all 198 models on a deeper level, “Even if you only ever go to one of those project pages, the realization that there are 198 projects around you that have that same level of detail and someone has thought about them to that level of detail is an added dimension to the project that we think is super valuable.”

We are incredibly excited to see the UNBUILT team utilizing Modelo’s embeddable 3D visualization technology, and we’re looking forward to providing architects and designers with 3D presentation tools through our platform. Modelo is now in private beta. For early access, you can sign up here!

Here are some more models from the UNBUILT pavilion for you to view.
(Click and drag to rotate, scroll up and down to zoom in and out)