The pavilion in Kensington Gardens, like all the previous ones, will be built by the beginning of summer, and at the end of the warm season it will be dismantled and sold at a charity auction. Recall that since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery has invited an architect who has not built anything in England every year to design a summer pavilion on the lawn next to its main building. This building serves as a cafe during the day and a hall for concerts and open discussions in the evening. This architectural program at the time of its launch was the only one of its kind in the world, and even now none of the "copies" can compare with it in popularity.
For quite a long time, the list of participants included only "stars" of architecture: Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Zumthor … However, in recent years, the organizers have switched to younger and more radical, and at the same time less famous architects. So Fujimoto became a transitional figure in 2013, in 2014 the Chilean experimenter Smilian Radic was invited, and this time the project was entrusted to the Madrid bureau SelgasCano.
Jose Selgas and Lucia Cano came up with a pavilion that reflects two themes of their work - membrane structures and bright colors. Their project is a construction of a multi-colored ETFE membrane: one layer of it will be transparent, the other - matte. A light outer frame will hold the building. Its cocoon-like volume of complex organic shape will receive several entrances and exits.
The authors wanted the visitors to be able to feel inside at once many "tools" from the architect's arsenal: "structure, light, transparency, shadows, lightness, form, sensitivity, changeability, surprise, color and material." This diversity also connects, according to their plan, the 15th anniversary pavilion with its predecessors: each of the past buildings will necessarily coincide with the version of 2015 in one way or another.
The pavilion will open at Kensington Gardens, London from 25 June to 18 October 2015.
