The Barbican Just Filled Its Brutalist Sculpture Court With a 24-Meter Pavilion of Clay, Hay, and Spice

Colombian artist Delcy Morelos opened "origo" at the Barbican last week. The piece is a 24 by 18-meter pavilion built from soil, clay, hay, seeds, cinnamon, and clove, rising more than three meters high inside the concrete Sculpture Court. It is the first artwork installed in that court in nearly a decade. Designboom covered the opening, and the show runs through July 31.

The structure is an oval with narrow walk-in tunnels and a quiet central enclosure. Morelos hand-built the walls, packing soil and spice mixtures directly against the brutalist concrete. The spices do two jobs: they trigger olfactory memory the moment you cross the threshold, and they act as antifungals that keep the soil structurally alive for the full ten-week run. Visitors are asked not to touch, not to use flash. The work changes as the city around it changes. Light shifts, humidity moves, the smell deepens.

Maybe this is what happens when "biophilic design" stops meaning a planter on a phone charger and starts meaning twenty-four meters of actual earth inside the building. The argument here is material, not rhetorical: slowness is a property of what something is made of, not of how its interface behaves. The pavilion does its work by being made of slow stuff. What if a building could borrow that property without an artist having to bring her own soil?