Climbing for Equality

Pride Pavilion ‘after-life’ Competition

In 2021, a team of young architects from Foster + Partners won the Pride Pop Up pavilion competition, organised by Architecture LGBT+ and the London Festival of Architecture.

Located in the gardens of St Anne’s Church in Soho, the ‘Rainbow After the Storm’ pavilion symbolized the various dissonances and synchronicities in the experiences and responses to the two health emergencies – the AIDS pandemic and COVID-19 pandemic – while displaying a message of positivity and togetherness.

Following the success of the pavilion, and in our efforts to reuse building materials, Foster + Partners held an in-house competition – ‘after-life’ – inviting colleagues to design a structure using the dismantled elements of the pavilion.

Judged by a panel of architects and colleagues from Foster + Partners, facilities, and sustainability departments, the top three designs were selected based on the following criteria:

Use of materials
2. Simplicity and practicality
3. Aesthetic design quality
4. Creative concept or approach

“The ‘Climbing for equality’ sculpture symbolizes two things, the first is that the straight community and the LGBTQ+ community can coexist perfectly well while separate, but when they come together, they can create something much better for the world, in the same way that the elements of tensegrity come together to create balance.

On the other hand, this tensegrity also represents the members of an architectural practice – if one element fails, the team is compromised, and therefore the desired result may not be achieved in the same way that if the timber slats or ropes fail, the sculpture may fall. In conclusion, all elements must work together.

The sculpture comes from the tensegrity concept, in the shape of an Icosahedron, in which the timber slats act as compression elements and the colored ropes as tension elements.” Pablo Diego Pastor.