Bahrain’s celebrated pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015 was designed by an architect who had never actually visited the country, according to a report.

Dutchman Anne Holtrop was attempting to 'define a certain atmosphere of place' with his 'Archaeologies of Green' design, he told architecture and design magazine Dezeen, reported the Gulf Daily News, our sister publication.

'Bahrain has a very long history that includes the Dilmun civilisation, 2,500 years before Christ, so there is a lot of mythology,' he said.

'It is mentioned as being the place of the Garden of Eden and the home of a million palm trees. It's a very green oasis within the surrounding Arab countries.'

Ambience

Holtrop, who admitted that he had never even heard of Bahrain prior to pitching for the contract to design the country's pavilion, said the brief had called for architecture that created an ambience.

'They really wanted to get back to this idea of the architecture itself,' he said.

'I didn't want to make a representation like the Qatar pavilion or one of the others or a pastiche, a kind of fake representation of an old architecture. I think this is less interesting.

'I wanted to make something which starts by minding the past but is making the future.'

Constructed out of 350 concrete slabs that form a series of 10 gardens, replete with fruit-bearing trees flowering at different times throughout the expo, the pavilion has been designed in such a way that it can be taken apart and shipped back to Bahrain.

Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities (BACA) president Shaikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa previously told the GDN that the pavilion would be used as a botanical garden once it arrives back in the country.

'I had never heard of Bahrain, but the proposal we made '“ the enclosed gardens, this kind of open space, the white concrete '“ for me kind of felt intuitively right to propose it for Bahrain,' said Mr Holtrop.

'Some of the trees are more than 100 years old, and they will all be fruit bearing and blossoming during the six months of the expo.

'The architecture we made exactly follows the drawing.

'There are 350 pieces of concrete in total prefabricated white concrete panels that we assembled like a puzzle, but they are loosely stacked on top of each other.

'The idea is that, after the Expo, we will ship the whole building to Bahrain, where it will become a pavilion and botanical garden.

'It was not in the brief, but when I proposed in the competition that I wanted to make this project out of puzzle pieces of concrete, the client asked if we would be able to disassemble it again and move it.

'I said it was possible, so they decided to ship it back to Bahrain and have it there as a permanent building.'

Because the pavilion was being designed to last not just for a matter of months 'but for 50 years' or more, the level of detail was accentuated, Holtrop said.

'Then of course we knew that we could also make things more elaborate,' he said.

Detail

'On the detail level, for instance, we finished everything besides the concrete in brass, so the doors, the gate, the roof sails, and everything else we could, we did in brass.

'I think that makes it less of a building for a fair, which is temporary, but makes it more emotional and gives it a real presence.'

Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera has described Bahrain's pavilion as the best in the whole expo.

It has also won praise from international travel, design, entertainment, fashion and media magazine Wallpaper, which described the pavilion as 'a rich collection of fragrant walled fruit gardens intersected by roofed exhibition areas that provided moments of mystery, surprise and release'. – TradeArabia News Service