Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2004

The history of the temporary summer pavilions in front of the Serpentine Gallery has been tracked with Archiweb for several seasons, and therefore, when the opportunity arose, I eagerly rushed to the Kensington Gardens upon my arrival in London, where surprisingly nothing was happening that year. Unfortunately, I do not know the full background of the story. However, it can be easily observed that MVRDV took on too big a bite (compared to previous years, a scale many times larger and certainly not unfeasible but too costly construction). The management of Serpentine initially accepted the Dutch whims and postponed the realization of the pavilion to summer 2005. However, in January of this year, news of a new project from the Portuguese legends appeared, and the steel mountain was put on ice. At the time when I was looking at photos from the construction of the new Serpentine Gallery Pavilion for 2005 by Álvaro Siza and Souto de Moura, there was news in the press that a similar mountain (covering my favorite pavilion from Josef Hoffman from June 12 to November 6, 2005) was successfully realized temporarily by the Austrians at the 51st Venice Biennale. It may not be as elegant as the one in MVRDV's visualizations, but it shows that their project was indeed possible to execute.

Dutch radicals were selected for 2004. The project arrived on time, but the realization had to be postponed. Architects from the flattest country in Europe lived up to their reputation, and their pavilion is a mountain, overshadowing the existing Serpentine Gallery. The radical project demanded a radical extension of the preparatory period. So far, everything indicates that its realization will succeed next year.