The long-awaited pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery in London opened this Friday

The new summer pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens in London opened this Friday and will last until November 2007.

The construction of the new pavilion was entrusted to Olafur Eliasson , an artist born in Denmark and the Norwegian architect Kietil Thorsen from the workshop of SnØhetta . It was this couple who took up the annual project of the London Art Gallery instead of Fry Otto, whose project turned out to be too ambitious and complicated to realize it by the scheduled opening of the pavilion.

The construction will be the largest in the history of temporary buildings erected under the Serpentine Gallery program since 2000. With its appearance, it will resemble a children's top, sheathed in wood, the main formal element of which will be a wide ramp twisting around the pavilion's volume two turns. According to it, visitors will be able to climb the viewing platform on its roof.

The building appeared on the site of a temporary replacement of the temporary pavilion - the installation of Zaha Hadid and her partner Patrick Schumacher , who stood from July to August, in view of the fact that the project of the Danish and Norwegian was still somewhat more difficult to implement than the gallery’s management supposed.
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According to Eliasson, the form and content of the building are closely intertwined, and as a result, a space is created where visitors can communicate and walk. The artist also took part in drawing up a program of events to be held in the pavilion in the evenings. In the daytime, the facility will play the role of a cafe.

Fry Otto refuses to give any comments about the change of architect. This last minute change is not the first case for the Serpentine summer pavilions program: in 2004, the very ambitious project of the Dutch MVRDV was postponed for a year, but eventually replaced by a more modest one - the Portuguese architects Alvaro Ciza and Eduardo Souto de Moura .





Photos courtesy of the English resource Building Design
Text courtesy of the domestic resource Building MG