A slate canopy will descend over Kensington Gardens this summer, when Ishigami installs the 19th edition of the Serpentine Pavilion on the lawn of the London gallery.

Toothpick-thin columns will support the heavy mass of the roof, which is to ascend gently up from the grass towards the sky on precariously thinner stilts. 

This type of fragile balance is characteristic of Ishigami and his practice Junya Ishigami + Associates – he was honoured with the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennial in 2010 for a project in which material limits were pushed beyond the brink of collapse. 

"My design for the pavilion plays with our perspectives of the built environment against the backdrop of a natural landscape, emphasising a natural and organic feel as though it had grown out of the lawn, resembling a hill made out of rocks,” says Ishigami.

“This is an attempt to supplement traditional architecture with modern methodologies and concepts, to create in this place an expanse of scenery like never seen before. Possessing the weighty presence of slate roofs seen around the world, and simultaneously appearing so light it could blow away in the breeze, the cluster of scattered rock levitates, like a billowing piece of fabric."

Ishigami, who established his practice in 2004 following his departure from SANAA, was selected to design the 19th annual Serpentine Pavilion by a committee including architects Sir David Adjaye OBE and Lord Richard Rogers, alongside Serpentine Galleries Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist and CEO Yana Peel. 

The series began with a commission to the late Zaha Hadid in 2000, and has since seen pavilions by architects including Herzog & de Meuron, Bjarke Ingels, Diébédo Francis Kéré, Frida Escobedo and Smiljan Radić installed in the gallery's gardens. 

This year's Serpentine Pavilion will open to the public on 20 June and remain in-situ throughout the summer until it's close on 6 October 2019.

The gallery, in collaboration with Google Arts an Culture, will also put on display an unrealised project as part of a new Serpentine Augumented Architecture programme.