Carney Logan Burke Architects (CLB) has dropped an all-in-one performance venue, sculpture, and gathering space for the public in front of the Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The austere Town Enclosure, installed on June 27, 2018, was designed to have a minimalist footprint and will be repurposed for installation elsewhere (to be decided) by the end of October.

The airy enclosure was the winning entry in a 2018 competition to design a pavilion for the Jackson Hole Public Art and Center for the Arts’ 2018 Creative in Residence program. CLB was selected from a pool of local artists and architects. Rather than an enclosed space, as one might expect from the name, Town Enclosure was built as a porous circle.

Sustainably sourced timber panels were arranged four feet apart from each other and angled towards the center of the circular base to form the “walls” of Town Enclosure, with one side of each panel left raw and the other painted black. The openness of the pavilion is thus dictated by the viewer’s angle.

Approaching the structure parallelly, from the Center and the adjacent Snow King Mountain, makes it appear totally porous, but approaching from a perpendicular angle gives the impression of a solid, closed design. Although the pavilion is simple, the movement of the sun across the slabs creates dynamic shadows over the course of the day, and as the seasons change.

Even the base was intended to have a minimal impact. Instead of using concrete for the foundation, CLB opted to anchor the pavilion with reusable steel panels covered by gravel. Besides improving the installation’s portability and minimizing the impact to the site’s grounds, the base references local fencing and corrals from the surrounding mountains.

Town Enclosure is also first and foremost a performance venue for the Center’s residents, and talks, classes, dance and music performances, and visual art shows from the Center and community groups have all been staged there.