The Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion was built to tour the world to act as a venue for art exhibitions. Designed by the renowned architect Zaha Hadid, it had to be capable of being repeatedly erected and taken down and transported around the globe, and at the same time offer a comfortable environment for visitors whatever the climatic conditions.
The flowing lines of the building reflected Chanel’s unstructured approach to designing garments, with her hallmark feature of quilting being echoed on the polycarbonate shell outer surface. The interior was made from fabric and exactly reflected this curvature, with no two panels being the same. It was made by Architen Landrell, who have vast experience in fabricating such curving tensile elements.
This presented a big challenge for designing the insulation, which had to fit exactly in between the curved layers. In keeping with Chanel’s concept of having a quilted layer between the outer and inner layers of her iconic jackets, TLX Silver was chosen because, it was not only flexible, having a polyester core, but its reflective outer surfaces of sufficient tensile strength meant that it could be cut and shaped to conform to the curves over wide spans. Architen Landrell pushed the boundaries of what was possible in terms of shaping TLX Silver, by actually joining sections together with sewn seams – a hi-tech large-scale version of the pattern-drafting and fabric manipulation techniques used by Chanel herself.
The couture insulation provided by TLX Silver meant that visitors to the Pavilion in Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow and Paris didn’t have to suffer for their art!
