The first images have been revealed of the Serpentine Gallery’s 2016 pavilion programme, featuring four summer houses by international architects and a centrepiece created by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
BIG’s hotly-anticipated pavilion – the studio’s first UK structure – has been described as an “unzipped wall”. The structure – formed by a series of box-like fibreglass frames stacked in a brick-wall pattern – will host a Harrods-run cafe and events space during the day, and the gallery's annual Park Nights arts programme in the evening.
"We have attempted to design a structure that embodies multiple aspects that are often perceived as opposites: a structure that is free-form yet rigorous, modular yet sculptural, both transparent and opaque, both solid box and blob," said Bjarke Ingels.
"This unzipping of the wall turns the line into a surface, transforming the wall into a space. At the top, the wall appears like a straight line, while at the bottom, it forms a sheltered valley at the entrance of the pavilion and an undulating hillside towards the park.”
Parts of the structure will be warm and glowing, others almost entirely transparent. As a result, Ingels said “presence becomes absence and structure becomes gesture.”
Gallery directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist praised BIG’s design as “a supremely elegant structure that is both curvaceous wall and soaring spire” that will “surely serve as a beacon.”
The four separate 25sq m (269sq ft) summer houses, which will surround BIG’s pavilion, have been designed by Paris-based architect Yona Friedman, British architect Asif Khan, Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi and Berlin studio Barkow Leibinger.
Each is inspired by the nearby Queen Caroline’s Temple, a classical style summer house built in 1734.
Images of each can be seen below.
Yona Friedman
Friedman’s ‘space chain’ structure can be disassembled and assembled in different formations. The design explores how we may enable the growth of our cities while restraining our use of land, and how in the future people will be able to live in changeable homes of their own design.
Asif Khan
Khan’s summer house – formed of undulating timber staves and a polished metal platform – is designed as if it has grown from the ground. It explores ideas of sunlight, space and landscape in dialogue with Queen Caroline’s Temple.
Kunlé Adeyemi
Adeyemi’s summer house is a space for shelter and relaxation created by replicating and inversing Queen Caroline’s Temple into “a bold new sculptural object.” The structure will be created using prefabricated sandstone blocks.
Barkow Leibinger
The German studio have designed a building of undulating structural bands, which loops up into the air. The house is inspired by a blind contour drawing, in which the artist looks only at the subject and does not let their pencil leave the paper.
There is no budget for the programme’s buildings, which are funded through sponsorship, help-in-kind support and the eventual sale of the creations.
Engineers AKT11 and AECOM will collaborate with the architects to create each structure, which will open from 10 June to 9 October.
