The Serpentine Pavilion Visit

The Serpentine Pavilion

After visiting the Victoria and Albert museum we took a 10 minute walk to The Serpentine Pavilion.

The 2014 Serpentine Pavilion is designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić. A semi translucent, cylindrical structure that resembles a shell and rests on large quarry stones, this year’s Pavilion occupies 350 square metres of the Serpentine’s lawn and is home to and inspiration for the Park Nights series of events.

Radić's design for a temporary Pavilion has its roots in the architect’s earlier work, particularly The Castle of the Selfish Giant, inspired by the Oscar Wilde story and the Restaurant Mestizo - part of which is supported by large boulders. It follows, and contrasts with, Sou Fujimoto's cloud-like Pavilion which was visited by almost 200,000 people in 2013

Designed as a flexible, multi-purpose social space, the Pavilion has a café sited inside. Visitors will be encouraged to enter and interact with the structure in different ways throughout its four month tenure in the Park. On selected Friday nights, between July and September, the Pavilion will become the stage for the Galleries’ Park Nights series, sponsored by COS: eight site-specific events bringing together art, poetry, music, film, literature and theory and including three new commissions by emerging artists Lina Lapelyte, Hannah Perry and Heather Phillipson.

The Serpantine Pavillion's website quote:

'The unusual shape and sensual qualities of the Pavilion have a strong physical impact on the visitor, especially juxtaposed with the classical architecture of the Serpentine Gallery. From the outside, visitors see a fragile shell in the shape of a hoop suspended on large quarry stones. Appearing as if they had always been part of the landscape, these stones are used as supports, giving the pavilion both a physical weight and an outer structure characterised by lightness and fragility. The shell, which is white, translucent and made of fibreglass, contains an interior that is organised around an empty patio at ground level, creating the sensation that the entire volume is floating. The simultaneously enclosed and open volumes of the structure explore the relationship between the surrounding Kensington Gardens and the interior of the Pavilion. The floor is grey wooden decking, as if the interior were a terrace rather than a protected interior space.

At night, the semi-transparency of the shell, together with a soft amber-tinted light, draws the attention of passers-by like lamps attracting moths.'