Inside Asif Khan's Serpentine Pavilion Summer House

2016-06-09T14:40:00-04:00

Asif Khan who, exuding youthful energy, called the Summer House a “project” and an “opportunity”. The structure forms a circular enclosure with a circular seat at its middle, shaped by vertical white slats softly bending upward. Khan explained his research into Queen Caroline’s Temple, saying, “I took that as a departure point for my project, and plugging in sun path calculations to the existing temple, because there had to be some seriously clever way that it was positioned.”

“This is the ultimate birthday present for a queen!” said architect Asif Khan, who designed one of the four new Summer Houses that are installed as part of the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion exhibition. Alongside BIG's main Serpentine Pavilion, Yona Friedman, NLÉ, and Barkow Leibinger each designed the other three houses that portray their own architectural flair.

Khan's Summer House takes a poetic, what-could-have-been approach to reinterpreting the original Queen Caroline's Temple. The installation features a circular seat placed inside a circular form “shaped by vertical white slats softly bending upward”. Its circumference “has been unpeeled to connect us and the Temple to a picturesque moment left hidden by William Kent almost 300 years ago”, Khan describes in his artistic statement.

Using sun path analysis, Khan realized that Kent aligned the Temple toward the direction of the rising sun on March 1, 1683 — Queen Caroline's birthday. “Taking that as a moment in time, which Queen ...

Inside Kunlé Adeyemi's Serpentine Pavilion Summer House

2016-06-09T13:11:00-04:00

“While observing the building, we realized that the internal void was really a great quality to reveal, and so our building is really an inversion of that,” [Kunlé Adeyemi] explained. “In a way, it’s a rotated from of the temple that highlights the interior space and also creates the fundamental purpose of what we think a summer house is: a place for shade and relaxation."

Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ's Summer House for the Serpentine Galleries is constructed in prefabricated sandstone blocks, similar to the stone used in Queen Caroline's Temple, the 18th century summer house that served as its inspiration.

While known for his modernist designs, Adeyemi focused on the form and proportions of the neoclassical Temple, developing his own design from the "voids," or negative spaces, of the original.

Archinect's U.K correspondent Robert Urquhart covered this year's Serpertine Pavilion in depth and had the chance to hear Adeyemi describe the pavilion in his own words.

"We’ve been able to use this opportunity to perhaps create a place [in line with what] we think is a tradition in London: a tradition of public space and some form of humour in architecture, somewhere that furniture design and material in context can all come together," Adeyemi states.

For more on this year's Serpentine Pavilion and Summer Houses, read Urquhart's feature here.

Archinect - News

Inside Asif Khan's Serpentine Pavilion Summer House

Inside Kunlé Adeyemi's Serpentine Pavilion Summer House