Boring Like A Drill.

Just around the corner from where I work there’s a strange construction going up in Bedford Square. At the moment, it resembles a temporary albeit stylish stage: the deck on the scaffold helps this impression. There were a few placards on the fencing explaining a little about the project, but not much too helpful. Some of the workers would occasionally stop and chat to curious passersby.

Its location in a square on the edge of a park suggests that it’s a piece of public sculpture, but its structure makes it look like architecture. A bit of googling of the names on the placard yielded this website, and it immediately becomes clear that it’s architecture.

First giveaway: the entire site is done in Flash, so the site is hard to read and navigate, overly fiddly, and impossible to quote whatever information the designers wanted to impart in the first place. Of course, plenty of art websites use too much (i.e. some) Flash, but they usually have some scraps of helpful information on them, or at least have a section in which they try to justify their existences. On this particular site, though, there is a complete lack of interest in explaining itself to the world. This is the second clue that this thing is about architecture.

According to the website, the construction is called either the DRL TEN Pavilion, the DRL.TEN Pavilion, or the AADRL TEN Pavilion, depending on which part of the screen you click. TEN may or may not be capitalised. There is no evident explanation as to what an AADRL is, nor of what if any function the Pavilion has. There seems to be an exhibition connected to the Pavilion, which has already opened, but there’s no information on what it’s about or where it is.