The Puddle Pavilion is a free-form canopy made from algae-based bio-resin cast directly on the ground with no formwork. The installation was sculpted through an additive process we refer to as Action Architecture. During construction, algae-based resin was poured, splattered, and flung onto the floor, left to settle naturally according to the principles of fluid dynamics, and then suspended atop slender custom steel columns to hover above Mud Creek in Bondurant, Iowa, outside Des Moines. The Puddle Pavilion appears as a solidified resin river—or puddle—frozen in time: an abstract expressionist painting liberated from the canvas.

The Puddle Pavilion is the second piece of infrastructure in an ongoing art implementation masterplan that i/thee has designed for the City of Bondurant, Iowa, following The Dining Room (2024), a set of intentionally eroded rammed-earth walls, and preceding The Garden (2026), a meandering fractal boardwalk. Serving as a canopy at the Eagle Park entrance to Mud Creek, the work invites visitors to linger and engage more deeply with the local ecology of the site.

With the Puddle Pavilion, we were interested in achieving formal literalism. Where other architects and artists have sought to create works “like” or “as” a flowing river, we aimed to sculpt a piece by literally capturing the ephemeral beauty of moving liquid frozen in time. The Puddle Pavilion is not a metaphor: it is not like a puddle, but rather it is a puddle—made by carefully poured layers of algae-based resin, left to find their own forms under the influence of natural forces such as gravity, surface tension, and fluid dynamics, as well as environmental variables including temperature and wind speed.

Tapping into the intrinsic beauty of natural phenomena, the installation embodies what we refer to as the oxymoron, Abstract Realism: abstract in the sense of being non-figurative and non-compositional; realist in the sense of being non-representational and non-symbolic, sculpted in participation with natural forces. Here, art—architecture—is not a static object imposed top down by architects issuing plans, but a dynamic dance in which design is conceived as a negotiation—through the participation of architects, builders, and the natural environment working together in symbiosis.