Every year for the past eight years, the
Serpentine Gallery commissions various badass architects from around the world to build a series of temporary pavilions in the quiet Kensington Gardens of southwest London.
After a carnal night out in town, David and I found ourselves a month too early for the completion of this year's program, a collaboration between Scandinavian architect
Kjetil Thorsen and Danish-Icelandic artist
Olafur Eliasson.
In the past, the Serpentine Gallery has commissioned internationally acclaimed architects who, at the time of the Serpentine invitation, have not completed a building in the UK. Figures such as Rem Koolhaas, Cecil Balmond, Alvaro Siza, Eduard Souto de Moura, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind, and Zaha Hadid have all graced the soils of this garden. To top it off, the bulk of these projects have been topped off by the finesse of engineering firm Arup.
Arup is not your typical engineering firm. With a mission statement of "working noncompetitively with colleagues", Arup pursues the philosophy of "total architecture," in which structural, aesthetic, human, and environmental considerations are treated as parts of a whole. In a lecture to his firm before his death, founder Ove Arup said, "By creating a model fraternity, so to speak, we make a contribution to what is almost the central problem of our time: how to overcome the social friction and strife which threatens to overwhelm mankind. We could become a small-scale experiment in how to live and work happily together." (Woah, constructivism. Woah, Ayn Rand.)
With this fraternal approach to sharing ideas and social harmony, it's quite fitting that this year will be the first year in which the Serpentine Pavilion will host a series of lectures, in which it will act as a ‘laboratory’ every Friday night with artists, architects, academics and scientists leading a series of public experiments.
Open this month and to close end of November, the project will culminate in an extraordinary, two-part, 48-hour marathon laboratory event exploring the architecture of the senses.
Labels: architecture, art
