ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Dan Graham’s original motivations for developing the pavilions, before exploring whether there might be something further at stake in them that is elided in Alex Coles’s and Sylvia Lavin’s dismissals, and that may have much to do with the pavilions’ own ‘overproduction’. It argues that the global spread of Graham’s pavilions speaks to broader aspects of contemporary production, conditions that themselves possess an illusory sense of their inevitability. Graham’s pavilions refer to historical garden follies and gazebos, and more obliquely to the Arcadian vision of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s ‘rustic hut’, the eighteenth-century Jesuit priest’s potent allegory of architecture as primordial shelter. Despite their differences from one another, Graham’s pavilions betray a remarkable stylistic consistency. The generation of the ground plans of these last pavilions from such icons allegorises Graham’s broader desire to re-corporealise a consumer experience all but lost to the virtuality of a mass-media image world.
