I can’t wait to see the Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion this year. It’s such a brilliant idea, isn’t it? The Gallery has commissioned a temporary summer pavilion by a leading architect every year since 2000. The series presents the work of an international architect or design team who has not completed a building in England at the time of the Gallery’s invitation. Each Pavilion is completed within six months and is situated on the Gallery’s lawn for three months for the public to explore. Here’s a taste of the recent past:
2016 – by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels who conceived his pavilion as an unzipped wall. It was created using interlocking fiberglass bricks.
2015 – by Spanish architect Jose Selgas and his partner Lucia Caro. His psychedelic cocoon of iridescent polytunnels was inspired by the ‘barely controlled chaos of the London Underground’.
2014 – by Chilean, Smiljan Radic. Rocks are an important source of inspiration for this architect as, for him, they evoke the earliest surviving owrks of human architecture.
2013 – by Sou Fujimoto of Japan. Quickly nicknamed ‘the cloud’ by the visiting public this pavilion achieved a lightness of being with a 3D grid of stell tubes.
2012 – was a collaboration between Swiss architects Herzog & Meuron and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. This pavilion was a special edition built as part of the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad, and explored the meaning behind previous pavilion designs.
2011 – Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s pavilion was a discrete structure, basically a black box which held all its meaning on the inside. The building was a modernist take on a medieval monastery, with four symmetrical open-aired corridors providing just enough space to sit and contemplate the nature contained within.
Every pavilion has been very different – what will this year bring?
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