Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013

© Sou Fujimoto Architects | Image © Studio Cyrille Thomas for Sou Fujimoto Architects

Designed by award-winning Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013 will be open to the public from Saturday 8th June and can be visited until 20 October 2013.

Since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery annually invites internationally renowned architects to design a pavilion on the exterior spaces of the gallery, housing a summer cultural program, functioning as an exclusive showcase for contemporary architecture that attracts about 300,000 visitors a year, standing out as one of the 10 world's most visited architecture and design exhibitions.

Previous editions exhibited structures designed by Zaha Hadid (2000), Daniel Libeskind (2001), Toyo Ito (2002), Oscar Niemeyer (2003), Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura (2005), Rem Koolhaas with Cecil Balmond and Arup (2006), Olafur Eliasson, Cecil Balmond, and Kjetil Thorsen (2007), Frank Gehry (2008), Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa - SANAA (2009), Jean Nouvel (2010), Peter Zumthor (2011) and Ai Weiwei with Herzog & de Meuron (2012).

Widely recognized as one of the most important architects of our time, Sou Fujimoto, age 41, is the 13th architect to accept the invitation to design a temporary structure for the Serpentine Gallery. Exploring organic structures, his work has inspired a new generation of artists in seeking to reinvent the individual's relationship with constructed environment.

© Sou Fujimoto Architects | Image © 2013 Iwan Baan

The proposed structure consists of several steel trusses with 20 mm, resulting in a lightweight and transparent appearance, like a cloud merging with the landscape and the classical forms of the Gallery’s colonnade. With an area of about 350 m2, the structure was designed as a social space, flexible and multipurpose, where visitors are invited to enter and interact in various ways.

© Sou Fujimoto Architects | Image © 2013 Iwan Baan

Quoting architect Sou Fujimoto " Whether attending an event or simply relaxing in the Park, each person is invited to find a singular, favourite space inside and around the Pavilion. By day, it will function as a space open to all visitors, with a café. The largest of the terraced areas can be used as an events space, while other terraces provide further spaces for visitors to inhabit and explore. From certain vantage points, the fragile cloud of the Pavilion appears to merge with the classical structure of the Serpentine Gallery, its visitors suspended in the space between architecture and nature.”

© Sou Fujimoto Architects | Image © 2013 Iwan Baan

On the first day of its opening to the public, next Saturday, June 8, 2013, architect Sou Fujimoto will make a public lecture, the first in a series of public events that will take place during the summer, where he is invited to talk about his career, focusing particularly his visionary project for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013, where he experienced concepts of immateriality and lightness.

Find out more at http://www.serpentinegallery.org