Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2005
Behind the bushes, there is a dragon
The summer Pavilion project of London's Serpentine Gallery has become an architectural event, eagerly anticipated each year not only by professionals and critics but also by two hundred thousand visitors. This year's pavilion, reminiscent of a hunchbacked animal ready to leap, is already its fifth realization.
The Serpentine Gallery focuses on presenting contemporary visual art from around the world. It is known for its courage to initiate and realize complicated art projects tailored to its own exhibition spaces. The gallery is located in the middle of the royal Kensington Gardens in a neoclassical tea pavilion, and the summer Pavilion project, realized on part of its own land, was conceived in connection with the reconstruction of the original building (1996) into a multifunctional exhibition center.
The reconstruction of the building compelled the gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones not only to think about the most perfect possible architectural solutions for exhibition spaces but also awakened her interest in architecture from a curator's viewpoint: How to exhibit architecture so that the public does not remain indifferent? How to present architecture without using computer renderings, floor plans, blueprints, descriptions, and models, which always require at least elementary technical knowledge from the visitor and, for most of the public, cannot evoke an immediate spatial perception and an idea of dimensional relationships?
The answer to these questions, as Julia Peyton-Jones says, became the Pavilion: "Every year we select and invite an internationally recognized architect to design a pavilion for us, which will be realized on our grounds for three summer months; during the day it will operate as a café freely accessible to anyone who decides to enter, and in the evening it transforms into a venue for lectures, concerts, and screenings. The selection of architects we invite for this project follows clear rules: it is always an author who significantly pushes the boundaries in their field and who has so far had no completed realization in the territory of Great Britain, so this project essentially 'introduces' them to the British audience.
Through this project, we want to offer visitors a glimpse of the astounding possibilities and diversity of contemporary architecture, the opportunity for personal experience and specific perception. We offer them a comparison. The pavilion will then linger in memories but will physically disappear. And if you do not like this year's, it doesn't matter because you know that another will appear next year."
The pavilion, after its closure, will not end up in the landfill of exhibition projects; rather, it will be carefully dismantled and offered for sale. And the demand exceeds the supply!
The author of this year's Pavilion is Álvaro Siza, the recipient of the Pritzker Prize in 1992, who brought his long-time colleague Eduardo Souto de Moura into the project. Traditionally, Cecil Balmond, head of the engineering and construction office Arup, became part of the team, included in his preparatory staff in 2001 by Daniel Libeskind, and who has collaborated on the realization of all projects since that year.
"We wanted our pavilion to look like an animal with limbs firmly resting on the ground, its body stretched thin with hunger, skin taut, and head drooped. Like a hunchbacked animal ready to leap. Almost as if it were preparing to pounce on the opposing building of the Serpentine Gallery... We did not want to build a solitary anonymous structure. The pavilion should present a completely different type of architecture than that represented by the opposite neoclassical building of the Serpentine Gallery, but at the same time, it should engage in a dialogue with it.", explains the overall concept Siza.
The grid structure is made of beams. The natural material was chosen intentionally with regard to the environment of the park in which the Pavilion is set. The squares of the grid are filled with milky polycarbonate, which lets in a pleasant soft light into the interior space. The undulating shape of the structure ends one and a half meters above the ground and is embedded into the lawn with countless thin legs.
The panels of the polycarbonate filling of the grid are fitted with cylindrical "chimneys." Those in the ceiling part contain solar lamps that spotlight the interior space. The floor of the central area is laid with gray tiles that naturally contrast color-wise with the green lawn around.
In designing the furniture for the café, Siza used a similar material as for the Pavilion's entire structure – the tables, chairs with backs, stools, and bar stools are made of light bent wood and milky plastic.
Open: July 2 - October 2, 2005 - free entry
The summer Pavilion project of London's Serpentine Gallery has become an architectural event, eagerly anticipated each year not only by professionals and critics but also by two hundred thousand visitors. This year's pavilion, reminiscent of a hunchbacked animal ready to leap, is already its fifth realization.
The Serpentine Gallery focuses on presenting contemporary visual art from around the world. It is known for its courage to initiate and realize complicated art projects tailored to its own exhibition spaces. The gallery is located in the middle of the royal Kensington Gardens in a neoclassical tea pavilion, and the summer Pavilion project, realized on part of its own land, was conceived in connection with the reconstruction of the original building (1996) into a multifunctional exhibition center.
The reconstruction of the building compelled the gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones not only to think about the most perfect possible architectural solutions for exhibition spaces but also awakened her interest in architecture from a curator's viewpoint: How to exhibit architecture so that the public does not remain indifferent? How to present architecture without using computer renderings, floor plans, blueprints, descriptions, and models, which always require at least elementary technical knowledge from the visitor and, for most of the public, cannot evoke an immediate spatial perception and an idea of dimensional relationships?
The answer to these questions, as Julia Peyton-Jones says, became the Pavilion: "Every year we select and invite an internationally recognized architect to design a pavilion for us, which will be realized on our grounds for three summer months; during the day it will operate as a café freely accessible to anyone who decides to enter, and in the evening it transforms into a venue for lectures, concerts, and screenings. The selection of architects we invite for this project follows clear rules: it is always an author who significantly pushes the boundaries in their field and who has so far had no completed realization in the territory of Great Britain, so this project essentially 'introduces' them to the British audience.
Through this project, we want to offer visitors a glimpse of the astounding possibilities and diversity of contemporary architecture, the opportunity for personal experience and specific perception. We offer them a comparison. The pavilion will then linger in memories but will physically disappear. And if you do not like this year's, it doesn't matter because you know that another will appear next year."
The pavilion, after its closure, will not end up in the landfill of exhibition projects; rather, it will be carefully dismantled and offered for sale. And the demand exceeds the supply!
The author of this year's Pavilion is Álvaro Siza, the recipient of the Pritzker Prize in 1992, who brought his long-time colleague Eduardo Souto de Moura into the project. Traditionally, Cecil Balmond, head of the engineering and construction office Arup, became part of the team, included in his preparatory staff in 2001 by Daniel Libeskind, and who has collaborated on the realization of all projects since that year.
"We wanted our pavilion to look like an animal with limbs firmly resting on the ground, its body stretched thin with hunger, skin taut, and head drooped. Like a hunchbacked animal ready to leap. Almost as if it were preparing to pounce on the opposing building of the Serpentine Gallery... We did not want to build a solitary anonymous structure. The pavilion should present a completely different type of architecture than that represented by the opposite neoclassical building of the Serpentine Gallery, but at the same time, it should engage in a dialogue with it.", explains the overall concept Siza.
The grid structure is made of beams. The natural material was chosen intentionally with regard to the environment of the park in which the Pavilion is set. The squares of the grid are filled with milky polycarbonate, which lets in a pleasant soft light into the interior space. The undulating shape of the structure ends one and a half meters above the ground and is embedded into the lawn with countless thin legs.
The panels of the polycarbonate filling of the grid are fitted with cylindrical "chimneys." Those in the ceiling part contain solar lamps that spotlight the interior space. The floor of the central area is laid with gray tiles that naturally contrast color-wise with the green lawn around.
In designing the furniture for the café, Siza used a similar material as for the Pavilion's entire structure – the tables, chairs with backs, stools, and bar stools are made of light bent wood and milky plastic.
Open: July 2 - October 2, 2005 - free entry
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