Serpentine unveiled

Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group this year’s Serpentine Pavilion is a three-dimensional fluid space, on show together with four Summer Houses inspired by Queen Caroline’s Temple.

Bjarke Ingels Group, Serpentine Pavilion, 2016

The Serpentine reveals the completed structures for its expanded Architecture Programme for 2016: the 16th annual Pavilion designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (Copenhagen–New York) and four newly commissioned Summer Houses by Kunlé Adeyemi (Amsterdam–Lagos), Barkow Leibinger (Berlin–New York), Yona Friedman (Paris) and Asif Khan (London).

The Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Bjarke Ingels, is an “unzipped wall” that is transformed from straight line to three-dimensional space that hosts a café and free family activities and by night becomes a space for the Serpentine’s acclaimed Park Nights programme of performative works by artists, writers and musicians.

Kunlé Adeyemi’s Summer House is an inverse replica of Queen Caroline’s Temple – a tribute to its robust form, space and material, recomposed into a new sculptural object. Barkow Leibinger was inspired by another, now extinct, 18th century pavilion designed by William Kent, which rotated and offered 360 degree views of the Park.

Kunlé Adeyemi, Summer House, Serpentine Galleries, 2016

Yona Friedman’s Summer House takes the form of a modular structure that can be assembled and disassembled in different formations and builds upon the architect’s pioneering project La Ville Spatiale (Spatial City) begun in the late 1950s. Asif Khan’s design is inspired by the fact that Queen Caroline’s Temple was positioned in a way that it would allow it to catch the sunlight from The Serpentine lake.