A pavilion is a smaller building set apart from, or attached to, a main building, and it was traditionally built for pleasure and relaxation. The word comes from a large tent raised on posts. World's fairs, art biennales and national fairs use national pavilions, and most are temporary, taken down when the fair closes. The Giardini in Venice holds 30 permanent national pavilions, some by leading 20th-century architects. Since 2000 the Serpentine has commissioned a summer pavilion from a leading architect every year.
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Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) sets free-standing walls under a floating roof, so space flows instead of forming rooms. In Hanover, the Japan Pavilion, Expo 2000 by Shigeru Ban with Frei Otto was a gridshell of recycled paper tubes, designed to be recycled afterwards, while MVRDV's Netherlands Pavilion, Expo 2000 stacked Dutch landscapes, from dunes to a forest floor, into a vertical park. He Jingtang's China Pavilion, Expo 2010 in Shanghai cantilevers an inverted pyramid of red beams modelled on dougong timber brackets. John Nash's Royal Pavilion in Brighton (1823) shows the older meaning: a building for pleasure, crowned with bulbous domes.