serpentine gallery pavilion 2009

SANAA: “The pavilion is floating aluminum, drifting freely between the trees like smoke. The reflective canopy undulates across the site, expanding the park and sky. Its appearance changes according to the weather, allowing it to melt into the surroundings. It works as a field of activity with no walls, allowing views to extend uninterrupted across the park and encouraging access from all sides. It is a sheltered extension of the park where people can read, relax and enjoy lovely summer days.”

For this year's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, SANAA, the collaborative between Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishisawa, performs a disappearing act, creating a silver cloud of aluminum slithering among the trees of the park above a forest of silver slender columns. The barely there, paper thin structures are signatures of SANAA and the floating cloud motif can be seen in some of their older projects, like the Civic Centre of Onishi or Flower House.



photos by Iwan Baan

The simplicity of this year's pavilion is a stark contrast to last year's bombastic car crash by Frank Gehry. Instead of making a big visual statement, it invites the user to consider the more inconspicuous qualities of the space and structure and its dialogue with the environment. Ryue Nishisawa describes the piece (here) as " a non-architecture idea, such as water or a rainbow". It can be said that both the SANAA and Gehry pavilions are both statements of exaggeration but on opposite poles. Whereas Gehry made a grand display of tectonics in his a tense and visually unstable structure, SANAA reduces tectonics to the level of abstraction, the pavilion visually becomes an abstract organic 2D plane floating above the forest of sticks; there is no architectural space, the inside and outside is one. My favorite part of the pavilion is perhaps the part where the canopy dips down creating a very low space which can only be occupied by sitting on the floor, breaking down the formality of the public space.

Photo by Javier Vergara Petrescu via Archdaily

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion is a yearly event where renown architects are comissioned to design a pavilion on the grounds of the Serpentine without any programmatic and budget constraints. The pavilion is funded entirely by sponsorship and the sale of the structure its tenure. This year, the pavilion will be open from 12 July till 18 October.