This order is often viewed as a kind of award - over the 10 years of the program's existence, the most famous and distinguished architects in the world took part in it, from Niemeyer to SANAA, who at that time did not build anything in England. Therefore, it is quite justified to include him in a series of awards received by Zumthor in recent years: the Japanese Praemium Imperiale in 2008, the Pritzker Prize in 2009, and now the Serpentine Pavilion.
According to the gallery representatives, Zumthor has long been included in the list of candidates, but circumstances forced him to invite him in the summer of 2011: the project of his first English building, intended for short-term rental of a country house of the Living Architecture program in Devon, was submitted for consideration by local officials. A similar situation has developed around Jean Nouvel, the author of this year's pavilion: his shopping center is about to open in London, so he was invited to participate at the last possible moment.
The only, albeit the most urgent, question remains the following: as an architect, best known for his brutal concrete structures (according to preliminary data, the pavilion in Kensington Gardens will be a cube of this material) will fulfill the main condition of the program - the temporality and (relative) ease of construction and dismantling. Moreover, the latter is no less important than the first: after 3 months of performing the function of a summer cafe and an auditorium in London, each pavilion is being auctioned, disassembled and assembled again at a place chosen by its new owner. Doing this with Zumthor's monumental creation seems to be both technically and psychologically difficult.
