Dubai, United Arab Emirates

 Algorithms are among us, they are an ever-growing part of our culture, their output is based on what they are trained on and who trains them,” states Es Devlin.

“The pavilion is at once an expression of the ideal of a culturally diverse Britain that I grew up with, tempered with our growing awareness of the part algorithms play in shaping the future of our culture.”

Designed by Es Devlin with Keith Morgan at Veretec Limited and environmental design consultants Atelier Ten and creative agency Avantgarde, the UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai is a twenty-five-metre high collective poem.

Es Devlin is an artist and designer who is known for creating large-scale installations and environments that combine music, language, and light.

Shaped like a giant wooden conical musical instrument, the Poem Pavilion gathers words donated by each visitor and uses an advanced machine learning algorithm to generate the cumulative collective poem which illuminates its twenty-meter diameter façade.

Devlin conceived the building to express Britain as a cultural gathering place, a meeting and melding of ideas and languages from across the globe.

Twenty-five million visitors are projected to pass through Expo during its six-month run, and each will be invited to donate a word at the “mouthpiece” of the pavilion, then enter within the heart of the instrument where they will be surrounded by donated words glimmering in illuminated Arabic and English, underscored by a soundscape gathered from multicultural choirs across the UK. 

As visitors emerge through the façade of the pavilion, they will pass through the twenty-meter diameter composition of collective text: a new poem generated every minute.

Guided by the engineers’ expertise in sustainable construction, the team chose to cross-laminated timber as the pavilion’s prime material.

Sourced from sustainably managed European forests in Austria and Italy and championed by engineers as a sustainable alternative to concrete and steel, the cross-laminated timber is crafted around LED tiles engineered in Belgium and manufactured in China, installed by local British and UAE teams, while the poetry generating algorithm has been developed by creative technologists in California. 

The pavilion has been conceived as an expression of cultural inclusivity and its execution is a feat of European and international collaboration.

Es Devlin’s exploration of machine-generated poetry began with Poem Portraits at the Serpentine Gallery in 2016 in response to curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s invitation to consider the idea of a “social sculpture.”

In 2017, she continued her explorations at the Victoria & Albert Museum, turning their annual artist-conceived Christmas tree into a “collective carol.”

In 2018 visitors fed words into the mouth of one of the lions in Trafalgar Square and watched the collective text projected up the length of Nelson’s column.

The text generated by the Poem Pavilion uses a machine learning model called GPT-2, a large language model defined by 1.5 billion parameters.

GPT-2 was originally trained on a broad spectrum of internet text, and for this project, it was fine-tuned on a diverse and carefully curated selection of over five thousand poems—comprising over two hundred thousand lines of poetry refined over months of iterative feedback from a diverse team of poetry curators.

The UK Pavilion has been conceived and designed by Es Devlin with creative production by global brand experience specialists Avantgarde. The theme of the UK Pavilion is “Innovating for a Shared Future” and will be based in the “Opportunity” district.

Project: UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai
Designer: Es Devlin
Executive Architect: Keith Morgan, Veretec Limited
Structural Engineers: Ten
Consultants: Advantgarde
General Contractor: McLaren Construction Group
Clients: The Department for International Trade (DIT); Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy; Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Department for International Development; Department for Transport Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Photographers: Alin Constantin and Ry Galloway