Serpentine Pavilion and Summer Houses

Wonderful architectural installations in the grounds of the Serpentine Gallery with their annual commissioned pavilion being joined by four summer houses down by the lake.

This year’s pavilion is by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and consists of a series of plastic brick shaped boxes put together to create an elegant pointed structure. The hollow boxes mean that you can see through the walls to the park and gardens around it. There were lots of places to sit and enjoy a drink

As an addition to this annual event this year there were also four summer houses based around Queen Caroline’s Temple overlooking the Serpentine. Three of them took the temple and the architecture of William Kent as a starting point. Sadly Barkow Leibinger’s wooden structure was cordoned off when I was there. I suspect our wet and then hot summer has not been kind to it. I loved Kunle Adeyemi’s version of the temple tipped onto its size. This seemed most popular with visitors with people sitting on it to chat.

Asif Khan’s structure was elegant ribs of white wood forming a curved shape. Sadly Yona Friedman didn’t seem to get the Queen Caroline Temple memo and his summer house was a climbing frame effect with panels on of representations of his watercolours. I thought this was the least successful.

Closes on 9 October 2016.

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