Padiglione Rosso is the permanent installation created by Alfredo Jaar for CityLife Park, the public art project curated by Roberto Pinto for the City of Milan. Jaar was invited to respond to the major urban redevelopment plan for the city of Milan's fair district: a grand architectural feat that includes three majestic towers designed by leading international architects (Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Arata Isozaki), a huge shopping mall and dozens of modern residential buildings.
To confront such imposing architecture, Jaar thought of a place that could control the space of CityLife, and to contain and frame it, he creates a small, 7x7x7m concrete cubic pavilion featuring red glass overlooking the CityLife complex. When inside the cube, the red glass radically changes the view of the space outside, and through this filter, everything is tinged with red.
"It is a frame that brings CityLife back from a gigantic scale to a more human one," says Alfredo Jaar, "a simple frame that gives the observer an overall view and the possibility of having everything under control. Red Pavilion offers a space for silence, for meditation, for thinking. A space to think about the state of culture and finance in the contemporary world. A space to think about the state of culture and politics in the contemporary world. Padiglione Rosso is a space of resistance, a space of hope."