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Here’s what the critics are writing about the 2024 Serpentine Pavilion

2024-06-12T16:31:00-04:00

The 23rd Serpentine Pavilion exhibition opened last week in London’s Kensington Gardens, drawing the usual mixture of praise and derision from UK-based critics who responded to the Archipelagic Void from Minsuk Cho and Mass Studies.

Kicking things off was the perfunctory Rowan Moore review. The Guardian’s longest-tenured critic seemed to enjoy the programmatic diversity of elements such as the Library of Unread Books and Play Tower, quipping that it is “an architectural equivalent of Korean multi-dish meals.”

Serpentine Pavilion 2024, Archipelagic Void, designed by Minsuk Cho, Mass Studies © Mass Studies Photo: Iwan Baan Courtesy: Serpentine

“It’s an enjoyable, playful, centrifugal-centripetal place, loose but distinctive, not afraid to be a bit ugly, full of contrasts and surprises, that gets a lot into its fairly small square footage,” he concludes. “The design is characterful but not dominating. It feels like what it is – a temporary building – rather than one that wishes it were...

South Korean architect Minsuk Cho and Mass Studies will design the 2024 Serpentine Pavilion

2024-01-22T13:13:00-05:00

South Korean architect Minsuk Cho has been announced as the designer of the 2024 Serpentine Pavilion commission in London. The Mass Studies founder debuted preliminary renders of their winning design this morning ahead of the exhibition’s June opening. His team's entry will appear as a star-like hub of activity to visitors, harkening them into experiencing a variety of communal spaces they say have resulted from a careful study of its past predecessors.

For the 23rd overall edition of the Serpentine Pavilion, a constellation of smaller structures will form around a central void space inspired by the vernacular Madang courtyard features found in small residential structures across Korea. Each of these five separate spaces will have a name and programmatic function while doubling as “content machines” and devised to montage with the corresponding flexible open areas and park surrounding the pavilion.

Serpentine Pavilion 2024 designed by Minsuk Cho, Mass Studies. Design render, exteri...

Serpentine Galleries appoints Yana Peel as new CEO

2016-04-13T15:32:00-04:00

Hong Kong-based philanthropist and entrepreneur Yana Peel has been appointed chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries in London. The [Serpentine's] trustees took the unusual decision to choose a fellow trustee to fill the new post. Julia Peyton-Jones, who put the institution on the international map, is stepping down as co-director this month after 25 years at the helm. Peel will work in partnership with Hans Ulrich Obrist...[who] takes on the new role of artistic director.

After 25 years, Serpentine co-director Julia Peyton-Jones is leaving

2015-10-30T18:03:00-04:00

Peyton-Jones joined the gallery in 1991 and was sole director for 15 years until she was joined by Hans Ulrich Obrist as co-director in 2006. The pair’s ethos for the gallery was “to think the unthinkable”. [...] Since 2000, she has also commissioned some of the world’s most sought-after architects to design a temporary pavilion for the gallery each year, which has become a highly popular annual attraction, drawing thousands of visitors to the park.

More recent news from the Serpentine gallery and its famed annual pavilion:

The Serpentine Pavilions from the past: Where are they now?

2015-06-17T08:07:00-04:00

Over the years, the Serpentine pavilion programme quickly became established as an annual christening of starchitects’ baubles, and most pavilions have been sold off to private collectors...The people who buy the pavilions do so in enormously good faith. They need to have a lot of land, as well as the ability to pay for dismantling the structure, moving it and resurrecting it, as well as fulfilling all of the statutory requirements of planning permission.

On that note, SelgasCano's polygonic 2015 Serpentine Pavilion will open to the public later this month.

Previously on Archinect

SelgasCano unveils designs for the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion

2015-03-25T13:00:00-04:00

Earlier today, the Serpentine Galleries in London released the first images of the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by the Spanish firm of SelgasCano headed by José Selgas and Lucía Cano. In keeping with the criteria of the annual program, this will be the first UK project by the award-winning firm, and is also the first pavilion designed by Spanish architects. According to a statement released with the announcement, the pavilion will consist of "an amorphous, double-skinned, polygonal structure consisting of panels of a translucent, multi-coloured fabric membrane (ETFE) woven through and wrapped in webbing." The images released with the statement consist of colorful, playful renders populated by cartoonish figures.

A much-anticipated event each year, the Serpentine Pavilion is one of the "top-ten most visited architecture and design exhibits in the world." Visitors to the SelgasCano-designed pavilion will be able to enter the structure from a number of openings, "passing through a...

Smiljan Radic unveils egglike 14th Serpentine Pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens

2014-06-24T13:17:00-04:00

Since the announcement this past March, Chilean architect Smiljan Radic has unveiled the 14th Serpentine Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery's Kensington Gardens in London. For the past 14 years, the Serpentine Gallery has invited famous architects like Sou Fujimoto, Jean Nouvel, SANAA, and Frank Gehry to design the annual temporary structure for the London Festival of Architecture. Their famous designers aside, the pavilions themselves are a story of their own.

An eggshell. A "Stone Age spaceship". A cocoon. A deformed donut -- Radic's design for the 14th Serpentine Pavilion is already receiving plenty of colorful descriptions. Supported by massive quarry stones, Radic's pavilion is a fiberglass, semi-transparent hollow shell that will be used to host a variety of social and cultural events and will also include a cafe inside. The pavilion's flooring also features gray wooden decking to make the structure feel more like a patio than a fully enclosed space.

Playing on the idea of the f...

Sou Fujimoto discusses limbo, dichotomies and nature in his architecture

2014-04-18T13:47:00-04:00

This past Tuesday, The Architectural League of New York hosted a lecture at Cooper Union by architect Sou Fujimoto, entitled “Between Nature and Architecture”. Despite the great number of practitioners and students in attendance (almost a full-house), the event felt more like an intimate conversation with the architect, as he shared his unique brand of architectural investigation. Each project he presented helped substantiate his lifelong interest in blurring the boundaries of established architectural conceptions. Fujimoto explained that he is inspired by dissolving such falsely dichotomous themes as: nature and architecture, the house and the city, complexity and simplicity, or inside and outside, in order to examine the new possibilities that exist “in between.”

The lecture progressed rather linearly, tracing his practice's themes from their conceptual foundation in his “younger ideas” through to their mature forms. As he talked us through some of his earliest conceptual sketches,...

Smiljan Radic to design 14th Serpentine Galleries Pavilion

2014-03-12T13:36:00-04:00

Chilean architect Smiljan Radic was commissioned by Serpentine Gallery to design the 2014 Serpentine Galleries Pavilion. Designed by big-name architects since 2000, the temporary pavilion has become a major summer attraction in London's Kensington Gardens for the London Festival of Architecture.

Reflective of Radic's past works, his design for the pavilion is a semi-transparent, shell-like "pod" that will serve as a multi-functional public space and venue.

Read on for more details about the project:

"Occupying a footprint of some 350 square metres on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery, plans depict a semi-translucent, cylindrical structure, designed to resemble a shell, resting on large quarry stones. Radic’s Pavilion has its roots in his 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.

Designed as a flexible, multi-purpose social space with a café sited inside, the Pa...

Bird's Nest Collaborators, Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron, selected for 2012 Serpentine

2012-02-07T10:42:00-05:00

The Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei collaboration – the 12th pavilion – breaks the mould of the sequence so far as the criterion for the commission had been for an architect not to have built in England. But Herzog & de Meuron are also deeply engaged in the art world, having built the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. They are currently working on art museums in New York, Miami and Kolkata.

Piet Oudolf's garden at the Serpentine Gallery pavilion

2011-07-01T00:45:29-04:00

So who did Zumthor call upon to provide the garden, the green hortus at the centre of his conclusus? Piet Oudolf, of course, foremost exponent of the new perennials movement, a low-key Dutchman with the build of a rugby player who has practically cornered the market in high profile planting projects: the Lurie Garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park, New York’s Battery Park and the wildly popular High Line are among his best known works.

A garden within a garden

2011-04-05T11:36:00-04:00

Peter Zumthor has unveiled his plans for a secret garden for this years Serpentine Pavilion.

In collaboration with the Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, Zumthor will create a contemplative garden courtyard enclosed by lightweight black-clad structure.