Juan Bechini

Pilates Pavilion

The Pilates Pavilion sets a semi-public program inside a private garden and asks how far a small building can open before it stops being a room. Rather than a sealed box dropped onto the lawn, the studio is assembled from a series of walls that fragment and structure the space, with a single continuous roof laid over them to define the interior. The governing move is one of definition without enclosure: the walls draw boundaries and organise the garden, but they never fully close it, so the pavilion reads as a fragment of the landscape given order rather than a volume set against it. That continuity is carried by the section as much as the plan. Oriented with its back to the north, the rear wall stops short of the roof, and in the gap between the two a semi-translucent surface takes over. Light entering there is filtered by the adjacent vegetation, which is left to act as a natural sunshade, so the wall that should close the room instead dematerialises into a band of screened daylight. Horizontal elements order circulation and use beneath the continuous roof, holding the interior together while the edges are allowed to soften. The plan is organised around a square of 10 × 10 metres. Toward the street, an internal courtyard of 5 × 10 metres holds the building back from the public realm, and the logic of pairing each interior space with an equivalent exterior void is repeated throughout. A core runs through the plan to organise circulation, and along its long side it reflects the lateral courtyards: the pilates room faces the internal courtyard, while the waiting area is set against a second courtyard that keeps its distance from the domestic garden. The enclosure is deliberately blurred, with the courtyards working as transitional spaces between programs and wrapping the user in a continuous sequence of exterior rooms. Approach reinforces the same intention. Entry is from the garden, where a band of tall vegetation forms the first separation from the domestic domain. A front overhang marks the threshold and leads into a waiting area that stays open to the exterior, and only from there is the pilates room reached. Throughout, the sequence of arrival is constructed in relation to long views toward the outdoor spaces, so movement into the building is measured against the garden rather than away from it. What the pavilion finally proposes is a way of adding to a garden without overwriting it. By fragmenting the ground into walls, roofs and paired voids, it introduces a new program while leaving the original logic of the site intact — an architecture that defines and orders its setting precisely by refusing to close it off.